#they don’t have the same mass production needs and therefore can get away with exploiting handmade labor

[hotdogsummer]

as spring arrives and the “all crochet is handmade” discourse begins it’s important to remember that just because something is made of yarn does not mean it’s crochet. there are many machine knit yarn pieces out there that are incorrectly labeled as crochet. know how to identify what actually is crochet before making a callout post on the internet or you will look silly!

[atheistforhumanity]

Hello, I'd love to know what your views on communism are.

Hello Anon, 

This is a great question. Thank you for asking me. For anyone whofollows my blog you know that I’m definitely a leftist and havepromoted Democratic Socialism. Communism is something that Ifind very constructive if not fully functional. The first time Itried to answer this question, I wanted to be detailed, but thatwould be much too lengthy for this platform. So I will do my best tobe concise in my answer.

Communism is known to people for the abolition of privateproperty. Specifically, Marx wanted to make all land public and forall rents to go toward the public good. Let me briefly discuss thisidea. To understand Marx's goal, we must understand the reasoningbehind it. What Marx was against was capital. The existence ofcapital monetizes everything, even people. In Feudalism and nowCapitalism, capital has been a tool of control over the masses. Thepoor must rent shelter from the land lords, the fields must beworked, but for the person who owns the land, the ore must besmelted, but for the person who owns the mine, and so on. The view ofpersonal ownership over things that could be public goods and meansis what has created the class system in every society around theworld. Capitalism says that personal ownership is the highest form offreedom, yet the proletariat owns nothing and by design will likelyown nothing their entire life. The point is that as long as we havethis idea of property where virtually everything is controlled by thevery few that “own” the land, the resources, and the production,then they will always be empowered to exploit the masses. The massesthen become a commodity, as Marx said, that must sell themselves tothose with capital. And those with capital do not value the laborerany more than what is required keep them alive and working. We havean extremely unfair, unjust, and uneven system in societies aroundthe world.

Yes, I agree that a change in property and ownership are needed. Ido believe that a home should be unconditional to all. To say that'snot possible is ludicrous, because we have more empty homes thanhomeless people. One reason I think we need change is so that shelterand security are no longer carrots that can be waved over the workershead to control the masses. If everyone had a secure home, then thisstabilizes the people and closes the gap of inequality. Instantly,the laborer has more bargaining power when he's not in danger ofsleeping on the street. It's not fair or realistic to say that such achange in bargaining power is needed, because generation aftergeneration the capital holders have shown they will pay people aslittle as possible and fight to keep that number low. It is capitalthat gives them the power to exploit people's situation.

And to quickly look at the production side of this. The idea thata person can own a company and therefore “earn” all of it'sprofit is a denial of the reality of labor and our most basic socialcontracts. Ownership itself cannot produce anything, so how do wejustify withholding this title from the people who do produce capitaland profit? Because ownership cannot produce then laborers shouldalways share ownership of the capital created. If capital did notexist, then the dynamic of employer and employee could not exist. Wemust recognize that in the origin of capital, capital could not beearned it could only be taken. Land was the first type of capitalever, and there was no one to obtain that capital from. It was takenby force, by tribes, individuals, and nations. America is built oncapital that was taken by force, and in fact slaves were the capitalused for investment to obtain the capital of resources and industry.The only reason anyone has capital is because it was taken by forceby someone in the past who becomes the ruling class and capital staysin the hands of that social stratosphere, and they pretend that theyearned it. In light of this larger view of capital, I see no reasonto allow it to be squandered and held over our heads.

Ideally, I would like to see a world where land becomes public andthe means of production are fairly controlled by the people who makeit possible. If you're wondering what this would look like, think ofStar Trek. Star Trek is a world where no one needs to buy a home,work for wages, or pay for their basic needs. Through miraculouslyadvanced production they eliminated the concepts of private propertywe hold today. I believe this is absolutely possible, but we haveourselves in such a contradictory system that a transition straightinto such a philosophy would be near impossible.

Without rambling too much, I want to talk about some things Idon't agree with in Communism. Renditions of Communism around theglobe have leaned toward curbing individual freedoms through bothcorruption and rigidity. I not believe that there should be one partyin government that prevents other parties from forming orparticipating. As an American, I see the ability to form, challenge,and dissolve political parties as a primary component to democracy.While I think that the proletariat must be allowed to share in theprofit and capital of production, we cannot hinder the individual'sentrepreneurial aspirations by nationalizing every single company. Idon't believe that automatic nationalizing of all companies is theanswer to our problem. One thing that Marx wanted was for the stateto have a type of monopoly, and I don't believe this is wise. I wouldnever trust any one entity to wield so much power. Matter of fact,turning land public from private could only be successful in ademocracy where oversight of the use of land by the people exists.

I believe we can achieve similar goals to what Marx envision withnationalizing by using a strong progressive tax system (which is inthe manifesto), making adjustments to our property laws, legislatingour way to a more progressive income dynamic, breaking down the nearmonopolies that exist, strengthening both labor and consumerprotections, and by eliminating money in politics.

Marx wanted to see the proletariat rise to a position of“supremacy” in government, basically meaning the people havingmore power then the small ruling class. In democracies we absolutelyhave the possibility for that to be achieved today, but the war ofinformation and ideas has prevented us from achieving that. Campaignsof disinformation and misplaced loyalties are holding us back.

Unlike Marx, I would never want the government to hold a monopolyover currency and banking. Ideally, I would like to a see a worldwithout money, but that's not happening any time soon. The productionand security of currency should always be a joint effort betweenpublic and private, and should hold checks and balances as does ourdemocracy. Is that we have? No, not quite, but it's better thanallowing any one entity to hold so much financial power. Again, Idon't believe we need the nationalization of all banks, I believe weneed stronger laws regulating the entities that exist in competition.With stronger regulation, better economic policies, and maintainingbalanced control over wealth and currency we can vastly improve onour current situation.

There is so much more to Communism and so much more I could say,but I don't want this to become too long. In summary, where I agreemost with Marx is in his desire to abolish class in society, as wellas economic inequality. I share some of his methods or at least thegoals he wants to achieve, but I often have different views of howthings could be achieved, especially in the context of modernsociety. The one positive take away from Communism that everyoneshould get behind is that the proletariat needs more power,economically, politically, and socially. The core of all societalproblems is the existence of a ruling class and a working class.Until those become one in the same, we will suffer the same issuesendlessly.

[litheammunition]

Brexit: An Unwinnable War

How do you stage a coup? You start a war. You fan its flames, until it grows out of control. You make it so that it’s impossible for the moderates to win, showing them as out of their depth, needing a stronger, unconventional hand to sort the mess out. Then you step in, and find that you can get away with breaking all the rules...

Act 1 - Project Fear

The spark was the slow part. There had always been rumblings of discontent around the UK’s place in Europe, dating right back to our accession to the European Community in 1972, and intensifying since the project formally became a political European Union in 1993. 

There had been a referendum in 1975, won by a 67.2% vote to remain, but the question was raised again after the 1993 Maastricht Treaty. No referendum was needed for the government to sign up, but neighbours Ireland and France held one to confirm the decision, and many in the UK thought they deserved the same. That year saw the birth of a number of protest parties, the most successful of which, UKIP, continues to pressure for ‘Brexit’ today.

After years of pressure from UKIP and the sizable Eurosceptic wing of his own Conservative party, Prime Minister David Cameron finally gave into their demands. In 2016, a referendum was held, with one simple question: Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union? No details were provided as to what the latter option would look like. That was down to the campaigns to provide.

It turned out that it was actually many options hidden within one. Every leaver had their own idea of what shape Brexit would come in. Many talked about the Norway model, a country with full access to single market, but which is obliged to make a financial contribution, accept most EU laws, and which has free movement with the rest of the EU. Others suggested a Swiss model, part of the EFTA but not the EEA, making a smaller financial contribution to access specific areas of trade, and again with free movement. 

Still others spoke about Turkey, with no membership of the EEA/EFTA but its own customs union with the EU, to avoid the need to impose tariffs on exports. They were a dozen combinations available. What was certain was that there would be some sort of deal, and it would be quick and painless to negotiate. What was clear was that “absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the Single Market” as Daniel Hannan, known as the Godfather of Brexit and a major push behind it, had said the year before. I have saved a full raft of quotes from other Leave leaders for Act 2, below.

On 26 June, senior Leave campaigner and PM hopeful Boris Johnson wrote an article confirming that the UK would remain part of the single market. In government and parliament, discussing how to implement Brexit, the main debate was between full access to the single market or only a customs union. There was no mention of crashing out with no deal. There was certaintly no mention that, in August 2019, over three years after the debate, we would be no closer to a resolution.

The Leave campaign seemed happier telling voters what the former option on the ballot would look like. The electorate might have thought they already knew what staying in the EU would look like, seeing as it was just the continuation of a fairly agreeable status quo, but they were corrected with a spate of glossy leaflets from the multiple Leave campaigns, and the same talking points brought up in every interview.

One colourful infographic, common across the material, tried to spread fear that the entirety of Turkey’s 76 million population was about to move in next door. The truth is that Turkey is nowhere near joining the EU, and that the UK has a veto (i.e. even if they tried to join, we alone could stop them). Turkey cannot join the EU unless the UK wants it to. But if you say “Turkey is joining the EU”, or treat it as a done deal, and slap FACT on it, people will get shocked. If you highlight it in orange and red with a big red arrow of Turkish people swarming into the UK, people will be worried. That’s what you want. It doesn’t matter if it’s true.

I use the term ‘swarming’ advisably, because although it’s a despicable way to describe to human beings, dehumanising them to insects, vermin, it’s the term that David Cameron used in July 2015, shortly after plans for the referendum were confirmed. As shown in other Leave material, such as the UKIP poster above that has been frequently compared to the Nazi propaganda below it, this debate was consistently coded with xenophobia and racism, an attempt to win by appealing to voter’s fears of mass immigration, the need to secure our borders, even though this was a picture of refugees moving approximately one thousand miles away and several countries away from the UK. 

If there was any doubt over the racial intention, the original photograph for this poster is below. It has a prominent white face at the front. Now note the way the original has been cropped and where the single opaque box of text has been placed, with everything else transparent. Note which one individual has been covered up, with all of the others put on show.

Even if they weren’t abhorrent, the claims around immigration are also not true. The UK already has control of its own borders. Whilst some other EU countries like France and Germany have chosen (of their own will), to have open borders with each other, in a region called the Schengen Area, the UK had the free choice not to be a part of this. This means that the UK has full border checks on every individual entering the country. The UK’s agreement with the other EU countries is that nationals of those countries (not refugees from the Middle East passing through) can stay here on a three month visa, but after that it’s our choice.

In addition, that agreement has always been subject to ‘grounds of public policy, public security or public health’, which effectively means that the UK can choose not to let in any individual they don’t want to. The UK has specific power to expel any EU citizen who they believe poses ‘a genuine, present and sufficiently serious threat affecting one of the fundamental interests of society’, and the country they came from has to accept them back.

In short, the UK only needs to accept productive members of society. Indeed, all research (including by the government’s own Office of Budget Responsibility) has shown that immigrants make a net contribution to the country’s economy, and many industries are dependent on migrant workers. The campaign to ‘end uncontrolled immigration from the EU’ or ‘protect our security - open borders gives criminals and terrorists an easy route into the UK’ is therefore another straight-up lie designed to leverage people’s base xenophobic fears. 

The frequently repeated idea that the NHS and UK benefits system are being exploited by migrants is also fake. Not only do migrants pay £78,000 more into the UK government over their lifetime than they take out over their lifetimes, but the NHS specifically depends on immigration: 37% of doctors qualified overseas. The problem with long NHS waiting times is not because the system is overcrowded, but because it is understaffed, and immigrants are the solution rather than the problem. But this is a government policy problem, and for too long they have found it easier to blame the people coming here to help. 

Before the referendum, David Cameron had also secured the UK further powers in restricting benefits paid to migrants, a massive compromise from EU principles of fairness which would have given the UK privileged status amongst member states. There would be a 4 year break before benefits had to be paid to EU citizens working in the UK, with tax credits phased in over the same period. EU migrants without a job would be restricted to claiming jobseeker’s allowance for 3 months, and then deported after 6 in they were still unemployed. Benefit payments would be fixed to the amounts available in their home countries, removing any incentive to come to the UK to claim them. 

This is all without even considering a fourth angle, that the freedom works both ways. Hundreds of thousands of British citizens exercise their right to visit and live in and work in the EU, just as happens the other way around. Finally, it’s worth noting that immigration from the EU makes up a minority of total migration to the UK, even with these supposed ‘open borders’, and specifically when net migration is considered. Most of the people coming for the long term do so from elsewhere in the world, where we have never had ‘open borders’ but still freely choose to let them in, suggesting that immigration numbers have always been up to the UK government and migration from EU countries will similarly continue at a similar rate no matter what the border situation is.

There were many other obvious lies at the time, such as the suggestion that the EU were in the process of building an army, a completely transparent attempt to spark fear, but they were told so often that they started to be believed. On the other side, all concerns about the risks of leaving were dismissed as Project Fear, a classic example of projecting: as the Leave campaign were in the business of fearmongering, it helped distract from that by accusing their opponents of the same at every opportunity.

Project Fear became a term used to silence all dissent as part of some elitist conspiracy. Some experts said that Brexit will cost the economy? Project Fear. Since the referendum the value of the pound has dropped off the charts, the UK has experienced negative growth at a time of economic success for its neighbours, and Sony, Dyson, Flybmi, Nissan, Honda, Ford, Moneygram, Philips, P&O, Airbus, Barclays, Hitachi, JPMorgan, Citibank and other firms have announced they are closing their UK operations and moving to Ireland or the Netherlands or other countries who still have trade links with the EU. Brexit hasn’t even hit its hardest yet, and it had already cost the economy £66 billion by April this year, about £1,000 per person. It turns out that the experts were exactly right.

Project Fear said that leaving threatened a break up of the UK. “If we vote to leave then I think the union will be stronger”, Michael Gove countered in May 2016, but the referendum vote has predictably intensified movements for Scottish (and Northern Irish) independence, as well as creating an endless dispute over the Irish-UK border, reopening scars that were just started to heal. Again, it seems that the people who knew what they were talking about... actually knew what they were talking about. The Leave campaign told people to ignore these false warnings as part of elite conspiracy, writing off the expertise of academics and industry leaders as ‘this country has had enough of experts’, an unexcusable anti-intellectualism that excused all lies and criticised anyone who dared to point out the truth.

They still put their fingers in their ears now, when reminded that those warnings have virtually all come true. This weak, the government’s reports on Operation Yellowhammer were leaked, their own forecasts suggesting a massive negative hit from leaving without a deal. When Kwasi Kwarteng, Minister of State for Business and Energy, was asked about them on TV, he described his government’s own projections as scaremongering and Project Fear, confused as to which lie he was supposed to be telling. Lead Brexiteer Michael Gove came out to dismiss them as the ‘worst case scenario’, even as a Whitehall source clarified ‘this is the most realistic assessment of what the public face with no deal. These are likely, basic, reasonable scenarios – not the worst case’.

It isn’t the first time. Theresa May withheld projections and legal advice from voters and MPs, and her government was the first ever to be held in contempt of parliament for deliberately hiding the facts to push through her votes: in contempt of democracy, in contempt of the truth, adding constitutional offences to the free-flowing lies that have been a feature throughout. Amongst all of them, perhaps the biggest lie was that Brexit was about the sovereignty of the UK parliament, taking back control from the undemocratic elites: from Theresa May and Boris Johnson we have seen two unelected Prime Ministers who have tried everything they can to circumvent British democracy, as detailed below.

[all-things-are-nothing-to-me]

Veganism From A Nihilist and Anti-Civilization Perspective

What is veganism? Another morality? Another alternative of society? Another swampy lake inside the infinite sea of the abomination of the existent? Most of its aspects are moralistic and anthropocentric. From this part not even the anarchists can escape. Veganism as a passive form of "struggle" neglects to consider many things from my point of view. Now someone could tell me it is exactly the same since you are a vegan. But no. My start is completely different. Instead of a form of struggle I would specify that as a form of abstinence from one of the wheels of civilization and capitalism with the admittance of its problematics in the present reality. Because as a struggle, from whom and towards whom would that be? A struggle of the civilized human towards yet another subject of exploitation could be nothing more than as sterile as many others. A victimization. On the other hand as an individualist choice of conscious abstinence and negation of the part of the existent that sees our comrades as raw material it becomes a dynamic choice. There is no "good" or "evil" for me. Inside the system of capitalism I deny the decadence which emanates from prisons and the tyranny of the life of the non-human animals. In another non-systematized world I would not deny, if the circumstances of survival demanded that, to use anything from whichever living organism. If I needed that and I was stronger I would prevail. With respect for the lives of my non-enemies. So a form of abstinence and anti-necrosis of my ego from the imprisonment, commercialization and trivialization of non–human life from the endless and infinite notion of civilization. Not as "embargo" to the industry of meat which would have no meaning for me because afterwards you will find

yourself nonetheless entangled in the wheels of another industry. These have no meaning for me anyways since the economics are a part of this system and have nothing to offer me. I want to destroy economy not to use it politically. Not as a choice of "good" or "bad" since I do not acknowledge any form of moral normality that comes from social or cultural structures, nor do I care about morality at all. So it is just a tool one can use given the current circumstances and nothing more. It is the closest approach for my individuality that has negated anthropocentrism.

Anyway you cannot be 100% vegan or keep an attitude towards the earth that you might have wanted through a system that everything is assimilable and we have seen that many times. Being an anarchist you realize quickly that everything inside the system of the state and civilization is your enemy. You find yourself in a constant war. All of the basic need products inside the system will either be made out of non-human animals that have died for the needs of consumerism and the various companies which enslave our lives, or will be toxic or non-degradable by the earthly environment, or will be the products of the vegan or environmentalist companies which there is being played another game of profit and consumerism approaching the moral or lifestyle consumers and creating other societies, assimilable, and of course controllable by the system. Even if you choose tactics, let's say as an example to expropriate shoes, you could avoid to contribute to the economic part of the system of consumerism but you will never be certain of whether or not you have avoided the fact that the shoes you stole could most likely have on them materials that are toxic or non-degradable (and would have been made in a way that pollutes the earthly environment), or even to have glue on them that uses extracted products from prisoner non-human animals. The systems of exploitation and destruction of the civilized man towards everything we love is endless. So as a nihilist and with conscience for total liberation anarchist individual, I don't see veganism and my awareness about the earth through any moral chains which would be easily assimilable by the system (the system includes laws, institutions, morals, state, society, civilization etc.) and I consider it ridiculous even for myself to play the game of politics, of looking to find the vegan products or those friendly to the environment inside the system of ultimate exploitation and trivialization of anything free and alive that exists. Therefore I am a vegan out of personal conscience, given the current circumstances, without becoming a monk, trying in any way and as much as I can to abstain from the dominant anthropocentric decadence of life in this world. The anti-civilization conscience is just another part of the esoteric of the individuality that acknowledges no other entity above the individual and his/her/their desires, analyzing the earth as a chaotic integral part of existence and reappraises his/her/their relation to it and all the other individualities.

Only through spontaneity, the negation of what we have been taught including all values and ideals coming from society, oneself's uniqueness and critical thinking, moments of attack and self-fulfillment and I could also say the coming closer to the earthly environment, I could see a meaning of existence (personal meaning, not as an objective truth) of my individuality.

Veganism is clearly only a tool against some systems. For the other forms of liberation of each individuality each one of us can invent his/her/their own ways. There is no singular effective way/means. We set targets, we are patient, we use every material and means against the enemy and with whatever power we have been left with and whenever we can we attack like the eagle without any moral barriers nor respect for their lives. Not for a "greater purpose", but for the time that has been stolen from us. Away from moralistic claims like "meat is murder" I feel the need to attack everything that attacks my aesthetic perception and doesn't leave me to get pleasure from my surroundings. I don’t have the need to criticize the comrade who does not follow the methods of veganism for his/her/their own reasons, but has developed a deep analysis against the existent, ( although meat eating and the use of non-human animals is the most dominant form of living on the planet), insomuch as this comrade will have reached a state of consciousness through critical thinking which will not leave him/her/their to fall into complacency with his/her/their choices or consider one way of living inferior or superior, normal or abnormal. I will criticize though for sure all those who do not question the mass habits of living as well as all the anarchists whose criticism of veganism originates only from the idol of the anthropocentric world.

[lonelyday-lonelylife-blog1]

Bitcoin Marketing To Help Make Yoυr Businesses Viѕible

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[innernations]

Caution: Reading this will change your life.

Well, I’m not working. I’ve found myself a few freelance gigs and life finally feels like it’s returning to normal after my six years of working 9+ hours a day including the commute. Because I'd been living quite a different lifestyle when I was working 9-5+ hours, this sudden transition to a freelancer's life has exposed something I overlooked before.

Since the moment I quit my high paying job, I’ve been markedly more careful with my money. Not stingy, just a little hesitant to pull out my wallet. For instance, I’ve stopped buying expensive to-go coffees, because they are never as good as homemade filter coffee.  I've become cautious of not just the big, extravagant stuff but also small-scale, casual, promiscuous spending on stuff that doesn’t really add a whole lot to my life. Because, as a freelancer, I won’t actually get paid for another two weeks.

In hindsight,  I’ve done this one thing promptly during the time I was well-employed — spending happily during the 'flush times' and then waiting for the ding of a text message from my bank on Pay Day.  I suppose I did it because I feel I have a certain stature of a well-paid professional, I have a disposable income, which seems to entitle me to a certain level of wastefulness. There is a curious feeling of power you get when you drop a couple of hundreds without a trace of critical thinking. It feels good to exercise that power of the dollar when you know it will 'come back' pretty quickly anyway. What I was doing wasn't unusual at all. Everyone else seems to be doing this. In fact, I think I’ve only returned to the non-consumer mentality after having done it so much. 

One of the most surprising discoveries I made during recent times was that back then, I had a lot of money but little time. There is no time to 'waste' and I felt the pressure of every activity wanting to 'count' in some way. Even the few minutes of a break were fleeting and were spent counting the hours until I had to be at work again. Spending more than 8 hours felt wasteful as the actual hours I spent actually working was about 4-5 and I had to merely be physically present for the rest of the time. I liked to come to work early and leave early, but no one seemed to get that.   

A Culture of Unnecessaries

A lifestyle of unnecessary spending has been deliberately cultivated and nurtured in the masses by big businesses(in a culture where consumerism, capitalism are seen as signs of human progress). Companies in every industry seek to encourage the habit of casual or non-essential spending whenever they can. In the documentary The Corporation, a marketing psychologist discussed one of the methods she used to increase sales. Her staff carried out a study on what effect the nagging of children had on their parents’ likelihood of buying a toy for them. They found out that 20% to 40% of the purchases of their toys would not have occurred if the child didn’t nag its parents. One in four visits to theme parks would not have taken place. They used behavioral psychology studies to market their products directly to children, encouraging them to nag their parents to buy.This marketing campaign alone represents many millions of dollars that were spent because of demand that was manufactured.

“You can manipulate consumers into wanting, and therefore buying your products. It’s a game.” ~ Lucy Hughes, co-creator of “The Nag Factor” 

This is only one small example of something that has been going on for a very long time. Big companies don't make millions by earnestly promoting the virtues of their products, they instead made it by creating a culture where millions of people buy way more than they need and try to chase away dissatisfaction with money.The documentary Zeitgeist explores similar themes and the hidden truths of money, banks, politics, and power.

Look around you. How much stuff is in your basement or garage that you haven’t used in the past year?

We buy stuff to cheer ourselves up, to keep up with the Joneses, to fulfill our childhood vision of what our adulthood would be like, to broadcast our status to the world, and for a lot of other psychological reasons that have very little to do with how useful the product really is. In fact, enough movies, art, books(1984, Animal Farm, Brave New World) and literature have pointed this out.

“We buy things we don't need with money we don't have to impress people we don't like.” - Dave Ramsey, Author 

“Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war... Our great depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won't. We're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.” - Tyler Durden in Fight Club

The real reason for the 40-hour workweek.

The ultimate tool for corporations to sustain a culture that doesn't stop consuming is to develop the 40-hour workweek as the 'normal lifestyle'. Under these working conditions, people have to build a life in the evenings and on weekends: an arrangement that makes us more inclined to spend heavily on entertainment and conveniences because our free time is so scarce. We'd rather pay extra bucks and get instantly gratified than spend time doing it - it could be something as simple as baking a cake or woodworking. The one conspicuous similarity between these activities is that they cost little or no money, but they take time.

I’ve only been freelancing for a few months, but already I’m noticing that I have more time for certain activities: walking to a place instead of driving there, reading, meditating and personal writing. I really didn't have time for these activities back when I was working full-time and even when I did, the short duration loomed like the sword of Damocles. The last thing I want to do when I get home from work is exercise. It’s also the last thing I want to do after dinner or before bed or as soon as I wake up, and that’s honestly all the free time I used to have on a weekday.

When I had a lot more money and no time, I'd think twice about spending the day wandering through a national park or reading my book on the beach for a few hours. Doing these kinds of things was out of the question. Doing either one would take most of my precious weekend days!

This seems like a problem with a simple answer: work less so I’d have more free time. I’d already learned that I can have a fulfilling lifestyle with lesser money than I was making with my last position.

Unfortunately, this is close to impossible in the advertising industry and most others. You work 40-plus hours or you work zero. Clients and contractors are all firmly entrenched in the standard-workday culture, so it isn’t practical to ask them not to ask anything of me after lunch time, even if I could convince my employer not to.

If technology has upgraded, why are we still wrecked by 8+ hour work days?

The eight-hour workday was developed during the industrial revolution in Britain in the 19th century, as a respite for factory workers who were being exploited with 14- or 16-hour workdays. As technologies and methods advanced, workers in all industries were able to produce much more value in a shorter amount of time. You’d think this would lead to shorter workdays. 

But the 8-hour workday is too profitable for big business, not because of the amount of work people get done in eight hours (the average office worker gets less than three hours of actual work done in 8 hours) but because it creates a purchase-happy public. Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television and its commercials. It keeps them unambitious and too tired and mentally exhausted to do anything else outside of work.

We’ve been led to a culture that has been engineered to leave us tired, hungry for indulgence, willing to pay a lot for convenience and entertainment, and most importantly, vaguely dissatisfied with our lives so that we continue wanting things we don’t have. We buy so much because it seems like something is always missing. Western economies, particularly that of the United States, have been built in a very calculated manner on gratification, addiction, and unnecessary spending. We spend to cheer ourselves up, to reward ourselves, to celebrate, to fix problems, to elevate our status, and to alleviate boredom.  

Can you imagine what would happen if all of us stopped buying so much unnecessary fluff that doesn’t add a lot of lasting value to our lives? The economy would collapse and never recover.

All of our well-publicized problems, including obesity, depression, pollution, and corruption are what it costs to create and sustain a trillion-dollar economy. For the economy to be 'healthy', we have to remain unhealthy, our mental health shaky and our impulses weak. Healthy, happy people don’t feel like they need much they don’t already have, and that means they don’t buy a lot of junk, don’t need to be entertained as much, and they don’t end up watching a lot of commercials.

The culture of the eight-hour workday is big business’ most powerful tool for keeping people in this same dissatisfied state where the answer to every problem is to buy something.

Parkinson’s Law is often used in reference to time usage: the more time you have been given to do something, the more time it will take you to do it. It’s amazing how much you can get done in 20 minutes if 20 minutes is all you have. But if you have all afternoon, it would probably take way longer. Most of us treat our money this way. The more we make, the more we spend. It’s not that we suddenly need to buy more just because we make more, only that we can, so we do. In fact, it’s quite difficult for us to avoid increasing our standard of living ( rate of spending) every time we get a raise. I don’t think it’s necessary to shun the whole ugly system and go live in the woods, as Christopher McCandless did. But we could certainly do well to understand and be aware what big commerce really wants us to be. They’ve been working for decades to create millions of ideal consumers, and they have succeeded. Unless you’re a real anomaly, your lifestyle has already been designed.

Is this you?

The perfect customer is dissatisfied but hopeful, uninterested in serious personal development, highly habituated to the television, working full-time, earning a fair amount, indulging during their free time, and somehow just getting by.

Three months ago I would have said hell no, that’s not me, but if all my days were like this, that might be wishful thinking.

[itsworn]

600 Lb-Ft Chrysler A727 TorqueFlite: It’s All in the Friction

“Good morning, Mr. Brandes. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to find out why a long-serving Chrysler 727 TorqueFlite three-speed automatic transmission suddenly and mysteriously expired when forced to support a brutal 499ci, 600–lb-ft big-block Mopar lording it over a 1969 Road Runner. Free the trans, contain the torque, and hand full control back to its legitimate owner, who just wants to drive the hell out of it. As always, should you succeed, the editor will broadcast your exploits to the world.”

It was an all-too-familiar pattern. Fix the motor so it can be all it can be, then the next domino in line topples. In this case, several weeks after Ray Lane’s big-block Chrysler (HRM, Sept. 2018) was fixed and properly tuned to its full potential, its A727 Chrysler TorqueFlite started going away. Since its last rebuild 10 years ago, it had been ridden hard and put away hot, but at first, Westech Automotive’s Norm Brandes believed that repeated joyful burnouts with the now-perfected high-torque engine was that final straw that seemingly caused the trans to throw in the towel.

Not that you’d notice it in everyday driving. “It was still OK at part throttle,” Brandes reports, “but suddenly, the tires no longer broke loose at each upshift like they used to. Its 300-foot burnouts were history, but the obvious signs of terminal rot hadn’t yet appeared: It wasn’t flashing the converter. There was no apparent surge. The trans fluid was slightly discolored, but it had only a slight burnt tint.”

For Want of a Nut

The final factor: A severe kink in the trans fluid output line, likely due to overtightening the coupling nut without adequately supporting the fitting or line, suppressed flow enough to send the old trans over the edge. “What a nut job! Be careful where your trans gets its kinks,” Brandes says.

At this point, the trans still passed line-pressure tests, indicating to Brandes the seals and hydraulic mechanism were basically OK. This pointed to, he says, a mechanical issue. Time to drop the trans and tear it apart, but during the removal process, Brandes’ crew noticed a big kink in the fluid output line at the trans. “This is the straw that finally broke the camel’s back,” Brandes believes. “The reduction in flow-volume overheated the trans when the car was driven aggressively. All these ‘little’ things matter when you’re making serious power.”

Confirming mechanical distress, when Westech technician Keith Arnold tore apart the trans, Brandes says, “He found burned and spalling clutch material, black spots on the steels between each plate, and delaminating friction materials in general. The stator and input shafts were brinelled, radial scratches had begun to appear on the drums, and the pump gears were worn.”

One little kink, so much heartache: The low-reverse rear band (photo A) is not considered to be a critical high-stress part, but if you can peel the material off with a scraper, it’s gone soft (yuck!). If heavy-duty low-reverse band upgrades aren’t available, just put in a quality replacement-level band and keep that trans cool! The low-reverse drum (B) the band rides on had wear grooves, meaning the band was slipping, but it was saved by repolishing in a lathe. Highly stressed, the cross-checking pattern on the critical direct (forward) clutch plates (C) were worn away, with the steels showing heat spots. “If driven another couple hundred miles, the clutches would have worn down to metal!” Brandes says. Both the steels and friction plates must be replaced. Ditto on the less critical red rear clutch pack (D): friction material “bluing”, missing teeth, and steel plate heat-checking indicate these friction materials were terminated with extreme prejudice.

Work of Friction

Chrysler’s rugged 727 is known for its extreme robustness and durability, but not all 727s are created equal. Depending on the original application and model year, strength and durability when used for high-performance work may vary. At the base of the strength totem pole would be a trans out of Mom’s grocery-getter; at the pinnacle are TorqueFlites originally used behind 440 Six-Packs and 426 Hemis.

Hemi and 440 Six-Pack 727s (top) had a fatter front clutch retainer that held five (instead of four) friction discs, plus a much wider kickdown band compared to even a standard big-block 727. Note the taller, angled Hemi stator support (bottom) versus the shorter, stepped standard support. Advances in friction materials have eliminated the need for these rare, expensive, heavy parts.

Over the years, there were also running changes, some making the trans stronger—some not necessarily so, implemented mainly to save some coin. In this case, the 727 core was a mid-level unit, representative of the majority of early 1970s big-block-style 727s, meaning it had several durability improvements over 1970-and-earlier units, without some of the economizing typical of some mid- to late-1970s versions.

Whether Hemi or “standard,” 1970-and-earlier 727s had a narrow front clutch retainer bushing (top) that was prone to walking under stress. During 1971, a running change was made to the front drum to accept an improved wider bushing (bottom). Upgrading from the early bushing is a worthwhile durability improvement. “It’s like going from two-bolt to four-bolt main caps on a motor,” Brandes explains. Installing the wider bushing requires changing to the later high-reverse drum and front stator support. The upgrades were already present on the Road Runner trans.

On the other hand, 600 lb-ft is way beyond the norm back in the day when the trans was originally manufactured, and the torque converter effectively doubles engine output. Obviously, it was imperative to ensure the trans would stand up to the beefy engine’s demands. On the other other hand, friction material continues to evolve. “Mr. X,” a leading powertrain inside operative who prefers to remain anonymous, gave us the intel: “Leading friction material suppliers such as Raybestos have a policy of continuous product improvements. So when compared to previous-generation parts made decades ago, the material science is vastly better. Effectively, this means that some of the ‘extra’ beef found in the rare so-called ‘Hemi’ versions —including extra clutches and steels, a wider front clutch retainer, or a much wider kickdown band—are no longer needed if your trans doesn’t already have them.”

The added benefit with modern friction materials getting the job done with “standard” TorqueFlite internals is that those larger, heavier Hemi parts add rotating mass, resulting in a parasitic power drain. And the upgraded Hemi internals are also very, very hard to find nowadays; today, most racers end up using specialty racing internals that shave weight while adding strength.

Friction materials are optimized for different tasks. “For example, when the 727 was originally built,” Mr. X reveals, “the original friction materials used in most grocery-getters were actually designed to generate a slight amount of slip to achieve the best engagement ‘feel’ without ‘clunk’. The old materials were very forgiving in the rock-cycle test, designed to simulate breaking the car loose in rock and sand, but—unless you have a rockcrawler—they were marginal for extreme high-performance or racing. Basically, aftermarket friction suppliers just gave the OEs what they wanted, which wasn’t much.”

Bottom line: Friction materials should be a good match for the intended application. Do you want the most comfortable ride; a harsher, quicker shift with no lost motion; extreme strength for durability in a towing, heat-generating application; or some combination of these attributes?

Beat the Shift Out of It

Being HOT ROD, we want to see the best no-compromise, performance-oriented materials available, so Raybestos sent out its race-level Gen2 Blue Plate Special clutch friction modules made from a modern non-asbestos-based silicone resin, plus a premium RayFlex Pro Series High Energy intermediate kickdown band. “The clutches hold more power for the same clutch material ‘stack’ thickness,” Mr. X says. “The Blue Plates don’t have a lot of heat-reducing grooves. They’re instantaneous, so in theory they have less heat to reject. They’re the race horse of clutch packs; they shift right now, within 0.5 seconds, compared to ‘heavy-duty’ transmission calibrations that are designed to shift in 0.6 to 0.8 second.”

Taking no chances, Brandes replaced the friction clutches and kickdown band with (from left) Raybestos’s best Pro-quality, Gen2 Blue Plate Special front and rear clutch module with steels, plus a Pro-series High-Energy, Kevlar-lined, front kickdown band. Here, the new parts have already been oil-dipped and trial-fitted (hence the discoloration).

No doubt, the special material and manufacturing process does impose a hefty price premium. Even for the venerable 727, there are at least two intermediate performance levels over standard replacement before reaching the Blue Plate level. Realistically, unless it’s a full-time professional race application and the car is trailered back and forth to the racetrack, Mr. X insists you don’t really need the Blue Plates with anything that still has a license plate. Even stepping down one notch to the Stage 1 series is more than sufficient for this application (for more details on Raybestos friction material choices, see the sidebar “Get a Grip” at the end of this article).

For the Road Runner’s A727 shown in the photos, new steel clutch plates that fit between the friction discs were also needed due to “leopard spots” observed on the original steels during initial teardown; Mr. X says the spotting indicates “friction material had gotten the steel plates extremely hot in highly localized areas, usually because of a defect in the steel. It’s a change of material state and can’t be removed, sanded, or ground out. Trash-can them!” Therefore, the Blue Plate clutch modules were ordered with corresponding steels under a single PN: RCPBP-11 (order RCPBP-10 if steels aren’t needed).

During the rebuild, Brandes installed new Raybestos bushings (kit RBUK-081, shown), its performance overhaul gasket and seals (kit ROHKHP-187), and a new filter (Raybestos 515613).

Band-Aid

Looking at the new trick Pro-Series kickdown band, it’s lined with tough Kevlar material. Used for ballistic armor, Kevlar stops bullets; here, it’s used to prevent the transmission band slippage. If the drums the bands ride on are to be reused, Mr. X cautions, “Do not roughen the drum—make it as slick as you can. The holding of friction works through a fine oil film, not by direct action mechanical action against the metal part. If the friction material touches the steel plates, it will start to abrade and fail. Plates should be polished or smooth with no radial scratches. Don’t bead-blast them. Pro-Series bands of the same width can replace original bands on drums without a wear track.”

Raybestos offers a 2.180-inch-wide, Kevlar-lined RayFlex Pro Series High Energy kickdown band (PN RPS38961W, photo A); 0.100-inch wider than a standard belt, it fits brand-new standard-width front drums (no need for a rare Hemi drum). For a reconditioned used drum, a 2.080-inch-width Kevlar belt is available with the same width as the OE belt (order PN RPS38961, with no “W” suffix); it’s plenty good for street/strip applications. Multiply clamping force by replacing the wimpy stock 2.9:1 band-apply lever (photo B, upper) with TCI’s “Hemi” 5.0:1 high-ratio lever (PN 146900, lower). It works like a high-ratio rocker arm.

’Body Building

If you can afford them, are there any downsides to installing the highest-level friction materials? Mainly, other changes are recommended to support and correctly work with the extremely aggressive clutches and bands. At a minimum, raise the line pressures while decreasing the band/clutch overlap engagement time. “A street car with OE-level line pressures can quickly wear out the more aggressive materials because they’re always slipping, just sliding the clutch pack on, rather than engaging it firmly as the aggressive materials were designed for,” maintains TCI’s Kevin Winstead.

Raising the line pressure and changing the shift overlap period are what entry-level shift-improvement kits do. The changes implemented by a basic kit, typically containing some springs, shims, check balls, and washers, are usually reversible (if you ever want to return the trans back to stock). Better for hard-core, no-compromise use are complete valvebody kits, but they may require enlarging valvebody and separator plate orifices, and often use beefed-up or improved pressure-regulating valves in addition to all the parts found in the entry-level kit. Again, Brandes went with a higher-level valvebody kit from TCI. The only step above it would be a full-race manual valvebody with a reverse shift pattern (TCI has those, too).

More aggressive friction materials require raising the line pressure and volume, accomplished with TCI’s Trans-Scat valvebody kit (PN 146900). There are several options, depending on how far you want to go, but basically changing the valvebody springs regulates the pressure (note yellow pressure-gauge card, A). Enlarging selected holes in the valvebody separator plate increases fluid flow-volume. More volume makes it less likely to overheat the friction materials. The included 1–2 shift valve governor plugs (B and inset) allow manually downshifting from Second to First gear at any speed.

“The TCI kit has several options,” Brandes reports. “In this case, for a street/strip car that was still mainly street-driven with only several track outings per year, we chose to raise the line pressure about 10 percent.”

As a general rule of thumb, Mr. X recommends, “For a street/strip car, you want to have 90 to 110 psi going into Drive, and 90 psi in Neutral. If this was a trailered race car, pressures should be much higher.” The end-goal is to carefully coordinate friction materials with line pressures and other valvebody mods to achieve firm, quick full-throttle shifts without sacrificing reasonable part-throttle shift quality.

Torque Matters

What happens when a bushing’s gone awalkin’ (too much torque, not enough trans): front stator support seal groove fretting (top), front pump stator support spline distress (center), and accelerated front pump gear wear (bottom). Hard parts and frictions are available from auto-trans specialists like TCI, Transtar, and PATC. McLeod Racing also now carries the full line of Raybestos performance friction materials.

Wear also dictated a new front pump, reaction shaft, and input shaft. As for the converter, while it wasn’t exactly toast, Brandes wanted a better match for the total engine combo, so he replaced it with a performance TCI converter that better complemented the characteristics of the 499 big-block’s hydraulic-roller cam.

Although the old torque converter could have been reused, Brandes installed a new TCI Breakaway-series converter. Designed to fit 1967–1981 24-spline TorqueFlites, the street/strip 10-inch converter (PN 141200) generates an effective 2,700-rpm stall-speed behind the big, bad Mopar 499.

Westech’s Arnold rebuilt the trans, setting its internal clearances up for performance use. He filled it with good, high-temp, synthetic Dexron VI fluid, installed it back in the car, and carefully adjusted its kickdown linkage. Well, Chrysler calls it a “kickdown,” but in actuality, the TorqueFlite doesn’t have a vacuum modulator, so its external linkage really functions like a later TV valve seen on more modern transmissions such as GM’s 700-R4 overdrive. Similar to the General’s 700, if the TorqueFlite’s kickdown linkage adjustment isn’t right, the trans may fry. Carefully read and follow your service manual’s instructions.

For performance use, Brandes likes to see 0.085- to 0.090-inch clearance on the critical front clutch pack (shown). Westech: “If you set this up too tight, you’ll have a parasitic loss if not in Third gear. You don’t want the clutch and band on at the same time. Set the rear clutch much tighter, at 0.024–0.025.” Alter clearance with different-thickness snap rings.

Motor tamed, trans back in the car, new fluid lines properly formed, trans temperature gauge added; the drivetrain now burning up the tires, not the tranny; and the owner liberated, able to drive the Road Runner as it was always meant to be—mission accomplished, Mr. Brandes.

Get a Grip

Raybestos clutch friction materials, from left: standard replacement HT and GPX, and performance-oriented GPZ, Stage-1, and Gen2. Note the differences in the grooves and cross-hatch for each level of friction disc. Grooves are there to shed excess oil and control temperature during a shift.

For Chrysler’s venerable A727 TorqueFlite, Raybestos offers three stages of performance clutch upgrades over standard replacement (which itself is light years better than the materials available in the 1960s). The Road Runner, whose trans was featured in the photos, makes a lot of torque and power, but spends most of its life on the street, with maybe a track day once or twice a year. For that car, today’s friction materials have gotten so good that any of the following Raybestos performance clutch module should be OK, but Brandes and HOT ROD wanted the best. Just be prepared to pay the price premium.

GPZ (gray): Exceeds OE material to withstand high stress, high temperatures, and repeated cycling—perfect for trucks, heavy-duty vehicles, commercial vehicles, and other high-stress driving applications. About 10 percent more expensive than standard replacement

Stage-1 Performance (red): Performance friction materials that are designed for serious street/strip or “tuner” applications that spend most of their life on the street. About 25 to 40 percent more expensive than standard replacement.

Gen2 Blue Plate Special (blue): These no-compromise friction materials are recommended for hard-core racing and other extreme high-perf applications. There’s no going wrong if you can afford them, but they require other complementary trans mods, such as higher-than-stock line pressures, extremely firm shifting characteristics, and greater fluid volume. About 75 to 90 percent more expensive than standard replacement (without taking into consideration other upgrades needed to support them).

Recommended for most street-driven hot rods, the fatigue resistance on Raybestos’s performance-oriented GPZ friction materials is about 25 percent greater than the best replacement-level friction materials. It’s also able to maintain its integrity under extreme heat conditions. And Raybestos offers two even more robust friction materials beyond the GPZ level.

The post 600 Lb-Ft Chrysler A727 TorqueFlite: It’s All in the Friction appeared first on Hot Rod Network.

from Hot Rod Network https://www.hotrod.com/articles/600-lb-ft-chrysler-a727-torqueflite-friction/ via IFTTT

[96thdayofrage]

The best thing that can happen in 2020 is for Bernie Sanders to do fantastically in the primaries and be cheated out of the nomination, once again, thus giving millions of leftish Democrats a chance to do something useful with their lives: leave the party.

“Kamala Harris is by far the most dangerous corporate threat to a revival of the Sandernistas.”

Early this century, the oligarchy of filthy-rich white men that rule the United States reached a consensus among themselves on the necessity of maintaining a regime of endless war and austerity. In truth, there was no other policy choice available to the Lords of Capital. The financial oligarchy’s success in consolidating virtually all political and economic power in an ever-shrinking cabal of the super-wealthy has all but eliminated the last refuges and hideaways of democracy in the U.S., while condemning most of the population to eternal insecurity amidst falling living standards. Late stage western capitalism has nothing to offer its own citizens but austerity, and no way to compete with the dynamic societies of Asia except through war. Yet, the rulers must maintain the charade of domestic social progress and mass upward mobility, although no such possibilities exist under this system.

“The provocateur in the White House shattered the façade of racial harmony that had been carefully cultivated over decades by corporate media.”

It is a ruling class political dilemma made far more complex by the disruption wreaked on the two-capitalist party system by Donald Trump, the orange-tinted huckster and mega-opportunist. Trump captured the Republican Party apparatus by throwing red racist meat to the hordes of white supremacists that are still the most decisive force in the U.S. electorate. The polite White Man’s Party of Nixon, Reagan and the Bushes was suddenly stripped to the waist and showing its Aryan tattoos. The provocateur in the White House shattered the façade of racial harmony that had been carefully cultivated over decades by corporate media, while at the same time calling into question the corporate consensus on so-called “free trade,” “humanitarian” military intervention (regime change) and increasing hostility to capitalist Russia.

The bulk of the ruling class and their operatives in the national security services and media sprang into (often hysterical) action to neutralize and expunge Trump, the disruptive element. In the mad process, however, they have done incalculable damage to the very national institutions that give legitimacy to the bourgeois political order -- that is, the institutions that justify the rule of the rich in a supposedly democratic state. When the CIA, the FBI, the corporate media and most of the Democratic Party are howling that the occupant of the White House is illegitimate, they strip the office, itself, and the electoral process for achieving that office, of its legitimacy. And when they claim that a few Russians with a hundred thousand dollars were able to set Americans at each others’ throats and decisively swing a national election, they paint a picture of extreme instability and political fragility -- not a superpower, but a weak society on the brink of disaster and dissolution.

“Sanders’ proposals on health care, livable wages and free college education awakened expectations and thirst for a better life among masses of Americans.”

The legitimacy of the corporate regime was simultaneously challenged from leftish quarters, by Bernie Sanders, whose 2016 primary campaign failed to stop the warmongering corporatist Hillary Clinton, but succeeded in proving that super-majorities of Americans (including Republicans) want Medicare for All. Sanders’ proposals on health care, livable wages and free college education awakened expectations and thirst for a better life among masses of Americans. Sanders’ proposals are not transformative, revolutionary or “socialist.” However, the mere raising of expectations among the masses of people is dangerously destabilizing in a society where the corporate rulers have decreed endless austerity and war.

The oligarchy cannot tolerate or accommodate a New Deal, Green or otherwise. Their model of development is embodied in Jeff Bezos’ demand that New York City fork over billions for the pleasure of his corporate presence. Austerity is not really a policy at all, but a recognition that late stage capitalism is incapable of investing in productive enterprises that create good jobs for masses of people, or to provide security and adequate social services for the rearing of healthy, happy families. Instead, capital exports jobs to the Global South, where workers can be super-exploited; feasts on the bones of the public sector in the home country, privatizing every public good that holds the prospect of private profit; gorges on war production and diverts trillions to the virtual casinos of the derivatives markets.

“Austerity is not really a policy at all, but a recognition that late stage capitalism is incapable of investing in productive enterprises that create good jobs for masses of people.”

Similarly, endless war is less a policy than an acknowledgement that the U.S. cannot compete with China in fostering infrastructure development in Africa, Latin America and Asia -- for the same reason that the U.S. cannot connect its own cities with high-speed rail: the system is moribund and cannibalistic, and has already stripped the home country of productive capacity. War is the only game the oligarchy thinks it can win.

In the years following 9/11, both corporate parties began to speak of the “War on Terror” as a “twilight” struggle that would last “generations.” The message to U.S. society was: this is wartime forever; lower your expectations; don’t demand upward mobility under these perpetual martial circumstances -- it’s unpatriotic.

Trump’s racialist coup in the Republican Party and Bernie Sanders’ breakout among the Democrats threatened to disrupt the “twilight” predations of the Lords of Capital. Trump told white workers the lie, that he would claw back the jobs that were exported to China and elsewhere, while Bernie evoked a revived New Deal. The ruling class blitzkrieg against Trump is now entering its third year, and has spawned a New Cold War that is methodically targeting dissent on the internet. The Democratic half of the rich man’s duopoly has moved frantically to pre-empt a second Sanders bid for the party’s presidential nomination, deploying reliable corporate chameleons like Cory Booker and Kamala Harris to nail down the all-important Black vote and subvert ”New Deal” sentiment from the inside by pretending to be Medicare for All supporters.

“The system is moribund and cannibalistic, and has already stripped the home country of productive capacity.”

The corporate media -- the same folks that buttressed Trump’s campaign with billions in free air time, in expectation that Hillary would knock him flat like a straw man on Election Day – are busy constructing a whole roster of corporate alternatives to Sanders, hoping to head off the kind of popular movement-style politics that Bernie thrived on in 2016. Kamala Harris is by far the most dangerous corporate threat to a revival of the Sandernistas, for obvious reasons of race and gender. However, as a career prosecutor, Harris is a lifelong operative in the mass incarceration machine. She is so wedded to the beast, she opposed compliance with a court order to dramatically reduce California prison overcrowding, because it would shrink the number of inmates available for work in the prison system. Harris can be effectively neutralized from the Left, as being even more pro-mass Black incarceration than Hillary Clinton, who never personally put anyone in prison.

It is critical that mass incarceration loom large in the unfolding campaign season. Austerity means freezing unequal and oppressive social relationships in place, and policing the resultant misery, anger and frustration. Therefore, an austerity regime requires the revving up of the state coercive and carceral machinery. In the Age of Austerity, the Lords of Capital need a Jailer in the White House. A Black female jailer like Harris is ideal for the ruling class.

“As a career prosecutor, Harris is a lifelong operative in the mass incarceration machine.”

Most importantly, the rulers need to give people something to feel good about -- the illusion that progress is being made, despite their own frozen or worsening economic realities. The trick is to promote racial and gender “firsts” and market them as socially transformative, in the midst of actual social and economic decay. Kamala Harris fits the bill, perfectly – which is why she is the most dangerous to a Sanders project, and why Sanders should jump into the race right away, before the corporate media declare a “front-runner” and otherwise make him appear irrelevant.

You don’t have to be a Democrat to root for Sanders in the primaries. What there is of a mass Left – and virtually all Black political activity -- is locked up in the Democratic half of the corporate duopoly. The tens of millions of social democrats that are effectively neutered within the Democratic Party must leave, if there is to be a mass resistance to late capitalist austerity, war and mass incarceration. Although Bernie Sanders is probably the most popular politician in the nation, with the most favored political program, the billionaires that control the Democratic Party will move heaven and earth to prevent him from getting the nomination -- as was done in 2016. The best scenario for the Left is for Sanders to do so well in the primaries that corporate party leadership is forced to resort to dirty tricks and transparently undemocratic means to steal the nomination from him in the clear light of day. At that point, progressives would have yet another chance to escape their subordination, humiliation and ultimate irrelevance in a corporate-owned party, and to create or join a social democratic formation.

“The tens of millions of social democrats that are effectively neutered within the Democratic Party must leave, if there is to be a mass resistance to late capitalist austerity, war and mass incarceration.”

People of the Left like me, who are not social democrats, would cheer an exodus from the Democratic Party as a huge historical development in itself, freeing millions from the corporate political machine -- a kind of emancipation.

So, start running again, Bernie -- and force the Party’s corporate operatives to rig the game, like last time. In righteous defeat, you could change the course of history.

[fmservers]

Here’s what to expect in cybersecurity in 2019

Around this time every year, my inbox fills with the same repetitive junk.

“Would you consider putting [any random company] in your gift guide?”, “are you going to CES and if so can I pitch you [a gadget that literally won’t be around this time next year]?”, and, “do you want to cover [a company you’ve never hard of’s] predictions for next year?”

To which I always respond: “No,” “absolutely not” and “predictions are not news.”

The “predictions” emails piss me off. Most of the companies that offer predictions don’t seem to fully understand the security field outside their particular niche, or worse, have an agenda they’re trying to push. This year was no different. I trawled through my inbox, scanning literally dozens of emails pushing “predictions” for the coming year.

“Artificial intelligence will stop a data breach,” said one email. “The supply chain will face more attacks,” said another. And, my personal favorite, “bad actors will combine multiple attack types to create synergistic super threats.”

Hate to break it to you, but “super threats” are not a thing.

If you thought 2018 was a tough year for tech, 2019 is going to be so much worse. The groundwork we laid this year will roll over into the next, and that’s when things will start to hit hard, from new laws and political (in)decisions to privacy issues and how employees — not companies — will start to call the shots.

Here’s what you need to know for 2019 in security.

Expect more data leaks and exposures — but not just breaches

2018 saw a rising trend in data leaks and exposures — specifically data that’s not protected with even the most basic security, like a password.

We’ve seen a ton of sites and services exposed in the past year — from gym booking sites, anonymous social network Blind, Urban Massage, FedEx, Canadian internet provider Altima, Amazon and fitness app Polar, to name a few.

Exposed databases and user data can be easily found, yet are entirely preventable — often simply by setting a password. Breaches, where a hacker exploits a vulnerability, are more difficult and require some level of skill, making them less common. But human error, a lack of security smarts or just sheer laziness makes exposed data more discoverable, and yet there’s no sign of data exposures dying down any time soon.

At Blind, a security lapse revealed private complaints from Silicon Valley employees

California’s privacy rules will come to a head

After a long fight, California passed its consumer privacy law — set to go into effect at the end of 2019.

Think of the law as like GDPR for California, which will mandate that companies disclose how they collect user data and what they do with it. The law will allow authorities to impose fines on companies that don’t comply or which violate the rules. It’s particularly important for consumers, given most of the world’s largest tech companies have their headquarters in the state.

Tech companies opposed the law. After spending collectively billions of dollars to comply with GDPR, many didn’t want to face another hefty bill to comply with more privacy rules. Instead, many companies pushed for a federal law to overrule and upend California’s soon-to-be-enacted rules. With enough lobbying power in Washington, DC, tech companies and telcos want lawmakers to roll out weaker legislation.

With almost exactly a year to go before California’s rules are set to go into effect, expect to see Silicon Valley work together — for once — to get their own way at a federal level.

California passes landmark data privacy bill

Brexit will hamper U.K. tech, startup growth

Brexit, the U.K.’s departure from the European Union, is set for March 29 — and all signs point to a “no deal” that will cause serious, if not as of yet untold problems with immigration, trade, and even intelligence sharing and security arrangements with the U.K.’s European partners.

Leaving the EU without any trade or immigration deals in place will hurt startups and the wider tech scene. Attracting good overseas talent will be difficult without knowing what the immigration rules will be. Even practical things like GPS will begin to struggle, as well as data transfers in and out of the U.K. without a deal in place once the U.K. goes over the cliff-edge. It’ll be a nightmare for companies trying to comply with what’s left of the EU data protection and privacy laws.

Certain technology industries will see more trouble than others, like the gaming industry, which contributes £2 billion ($2.5 billion) to the U.K. economy every year. And, startups won’t get off easy either.

Brexit-related concerns remain key for UK tech, says UK gov report

Australia’s draconian encryption laws will begin to hurt

Following in the footsteps of the U.K., Australia passed an anti-encryption law that compels companies operating in the country to turn over encrypted data on request from several government departments.

Many U.S. tech companies, including Apple and Cisco, called on the Australian parliament to ditch the proposals for fear that the law could be abused or harm its customers’ privacy. That didn’t stop a bipartisan effort to pass the bill in time for the Christmas break.

Some companies have already said they can’t — and therefore won’t comply. Signal, the encrypted messaging app, said in a blog post that it “can’t include a backdoor in Signal,” despite the mandate from the country’s capitol. Other companies will find themselves facing the same dilemma. It might force companies to think about their presence in the country altogether.

US tech giants decry Australia’s ‘deeply flawed’ new anti-encryption law

Facebook’s privacy woes will spread to other Silicon Valley giants

Silicon Valley is split largely into two camps: your data for money, or your data doesn’t make money. You have Facebook, Google and to a lesser degree Twitter and Snap in the first bucket — then you have mostly hardware makers, like Apple, chip manufacturers like AMD and Intel and computer makers like HP and Dell in the other.

Facebook had scandal after scandal this year, after years of playing fast and loose with users’ data. Facebook claims it doesn’t sell your data, but it made money from it at every opportunity. And when it wasn’t actually selling access to your data, it was giving it away.

Many have wondered why other data-hungry, ad-focused companies haven’t had their reckoning yet — and many are asking the same questions. Facebook may be one of the biggest consumers of user data going, but it’s not the only one in the game. In making some of the world’s largest social networks and ad platforms, these companies have inadvertently become mass surveillance tools — either for governments with access already, or hackers and nation states that punch their way through the company’s defenses.

Their time will come — and hot on the heels of Facebook’s slew of scandals, expect it to be sooner rather than later.

Silicon Valley’s year of reckoning

Employees, not companies, will dictate how the technology they build is used

This year saw a resurgence of tech employees rising up against their employers for — in their eyes — misusing the products, services and technologies they made for uses outside their moral parameters.

Amazon employees complained that the company’s facial “Rekognition” shouldn’t be sold to law enforcement after the technology was found to racially discriminate against African-Americans. Microsoft staff complained that the company had a $19 million contract to serve U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, during a time where the agency was separating children from their asylum-seeking parents at the border. And Google employees complained when they found that the technology they helped to build would go on to serve Chinese users that enables state surveillance.

Now it’s employees who are trying to call the shots. So far, they’ve had mixed success. Amazon executives didn’t care; neither did Microsoft’s — but Google buckled. Given it’s the talented folk at the companies that make the products, they believe they have a right to say how their products are used and who gets them.

This isn’t something likely to change in the new year, as the government continues to rely on tech companies for enforcement and surveillance. Whether they will be successful, however, will be something to watch.

Protesters call on Salesforce to end contract with border patrol agency

One incident away from sparking another Apple v. FBI crypto-war

Two years ago, the Apple v. FBI dispute could have taken a completely different path. The FBI was pushing a legal challenge that would forever undermine encryption protections — making it easier for the government to compel companies into complying with orders to undermine their own software security. This year, we saw the government approach Facebook to force the company to rewrite its Messenger app to allow federal agents to wiretap calls. It was all in secret — and only became public thanks to leaks.

We’re still dangerously close to another “crypto-war” (that’s “crypto” for cryptography) that could result in heavy-handed legislation or a legal precedent.

Nobody wants a mass casualty event. But as with San Bernardino and the apparent threat from MS-13 — whether inflated or not, lawmakers and prosecutors use bodies as a bargaining chip to push for more access to our data under the guise of preventing another national crisis.

Inquiry finds FBI sued Apple to unlock phone without considering all options

Gloves are off for U.S. and China in cyberspace — again

The 2015 pact between the U.S. and China that promised to curb each others’ cyberespionage efforts amid rising tensions and escalating attacks between the two nations was delicate and frail, but it was almost inevitable that it would fall apart someday.

In December, when the Justice Department accused two Chinese spies of conducting state-backed hacking on dozens of U.S. companies and government departments, including the Navy, the gloves were off, and the pact was over. The writing was on the wall for a while. Security firm FireEye said in its look-ahead at 2019 that China’s reorganization of its offensive cyber operations units “will inform the growth and geographic expansion of Chinese cyber espionage activity through 2020 and beyond.”

In other words, expect the U.S. and China to begin sparring in cyberspace again.

Justice Department accuses Chinese spies of hacking into dozens of US tech and industry giants

Via Zack Whittaker https://techcrunch.com

[inexcon]

RSI Comm-Link: Q&A: Anvil Hawk

Q&A: Anvil Hawk

Greetings Citizens,

Below are answers to the most voted for questions in our Spectrum Q&A Thread we posted last week. Thank you for taking the time to submit your questions and voting for the ones you care about most.

Also, special thanks to Calix Reneau, Kirk Tome, and Steven Kam for their help in answering your questions.

Can we swap the holding cell for other equipment?

No, the holding cell in the Hawk is integrated specifically into its design. The Hawk is a small, focused ship. In general, modularity in engineering implies a bunch of things, including piping and plumbing, structural loadbearing, and bunch of other considerations designed to handle different equipment of varied capabilities. That stuff doesn’t come free in terms of weight, cost, or complexity, hence why not every internal space is just automatically modular by nature.

How many total weapons, types and sizes, is the Hawk supposed to have?

The Hawk has 4 S2 and 2 S1 Weapon hardpoints with 1 small EMP device.

Is the EMP from the Hawk as strong as the EMP from the Raven?

At present, we expect the EMP on the Hawk to be in the same neighborhood of effectiveness as one of the Raven’s. A balance pass is scheduled for 2018 and this information may change.

When will the variants become available that are mentioned in the brochure?

The variants described in the brochure are ships that exist in the fiction of Star Citizen’s universe. Currently, there are no plans to implement these variants. Let’s see how much you all like the original Hawk, for starters :).

Will the Hawk fit inside a Carrack?

Considering that both ships are in whitebox at the moment, we do not have the final dimensions of each ship and can’t definitively answer this yet. That said, it is unlikely as the Carrack’s hangar is designed to field a ship the size of a snub craft.

Brochure mentions gun rack. Where is it located?

It’s behind the deployable pilot seat.

It was mentioned in the ATV that the prisoner transport pod could be used as a bed for the pilot. Is this the case?

Yes, it is possible that the pilot could use this as a bed, although probably a bit claustrophobic

How do the defensive features (e.g. shields, armor, countermeasures) of the Hawk compare to other light fighters such as the Gladius, Mustang Delta, and Defender?

Anvil designed the Hawk, so as you’d expect it’s reasonably durable, at least as light fighters go. In this respect we plan for it to have tougher armor than the Gladius, Mustang Delta, and the Defender. Its shield generators are presently intended to be similar in performance to those of a Gladius. While the Hawk carries on more armor, the Mustang Delta’s defenses include a larger store of countermeasures.

What’s the heaviest armor a player can wear while operating the Anvil Hawk?

Most of the real estate on planets, moons, and asteroids in UEE space that isn’t in active use or privately owned may be purchased. Some areas, however, have been designated as national parks, wildlife refuges, and nature preserves, and may not be claimed or legally exploited.

Is the Hawk going to be fast-tracked in development or is this going to be further down the road for getting in-game?

Generally speaking, smaller ships are simply easier to make, and ships without interior spaces are easier still. From a development perspective, the Hawk has fewer obstacles to production than larger ships with traversable interiors, and is therefore likely to be in game sooner.

Which loaner will be available until the anvil hawk is flight ready?

The Cutlass Black is the selected loaner ship for the Anvil Hawk.

Is the stated 500 m/s afterburner speed correct? If so, how will the Hawk stop prospective bounties from simply running away?

The Hawk is viewed as an entry level ship that focuses on being cheap, reliable, and versatile, and may not be able to handle every bounty – or at the least, may require a little extra tactical prowess to pull it off. As flight balance is an endeavor that will continue throughout the development process, the 200;500 stats should remain as a good comparison point for how the Hawk will perform relative to other ships as stated on the Ship Matrix according to the characteristics of the flight model point in time that it was introduced into the ship pipeline. Remember that as we experiment with the overall flight model to provide a better game experience over time, so too does ship performance adjust alongside it.

Is the prisoner stowage in the aft of the Hawk being designed for just a single seat, or will it be able to hold multiple bounties as the cells in the Avenger Stalker do?

The Hawk’s containment pod accommodates one prisoner.

This is an Anvil Ship, but it is still a light fighter. This class of ship relies on speed to survive and win fights. Since it’s already stated to be slower than the Gladius, what other points make this ship a viable choice over it, since the Gladius got the S3 buff?

Every ship has its purpose. The Hawk is a light fighter with bounty hunting features. There are some missions for which a Hawk is suited that a Gladius isn’t. Even considering their different mission profiles, however, the Hawk has an EMP device, which will play better in certain situations than a limited loadout of missiles (perhaps especially in bounty hunting), and it also has comparable shielding to and better armor protection than the Gladius. Remember too, the benefits of armor protection versus shielding against different types of weapons; although of course one prefers not to get hit, when you do get hit, sometimes you really want that armor.

What is the (in-atmo) air speed velocity of an unladen Hawk?

African or European? In all seriousness, having the prisoner in the holding pod will not noticeably impact the air speed velocity. Under the latest flight model in testing, at 1 atmosphere and neutral conditions, the flight speed would be around 165 m/s with max safe air speed be around 339 m/s.

Do I need to file a claim to build a base or mine?

No, you can freely build or mine planets and moons outside UEE controlled space but you’re on your own as far as security goes. It’s worth noting, too, that one of the largest deterrents to others moving in on a valuable section of land you’re working – or taking liberties with an outpost you’ve constructed – is the fact that within UEE space such actions are criminal and will have significant consequences for the infringers. These protections, of course, don’t exist beyond the borders.

Why make a bounty hunter ship with no interior?

Traversable interiors in general make a ship considerably larger – something you’ve had the opportunity to witness in the development histories of some of our other ships. Larger surface area and internal volume can in turn translate to higher mass (see http://bit.ly/2gPf7LP for info on how this affects our ship mass derivations), which quickly runs counter the Hawk’s design aim of a light fighter with a small landing footprint. Without an interior, the Hawk can run lighter, cheaper, and be more nimble. Instead of supports and reinforcements to shore up against the structural weakness of large empty spaces (relative to the size of the ship), those materials are more uniformly dedicated to keeping components and resource pipes firmly in place, making them more dense. This also benefits to the lone wolf nature of a player who only wants to pilot a single-seater bounty hunter ship.

What are the correct dimensions for the Hawk?

The current stats are: 17m long, 22m wide, 6.5m tall – It’s important to note that the ship is in whitebox and these dimensions may change as it moves through the production pipeline.

   $(function() {      Page.init();  window.Page = new RSI.Game.About();      });     http://bit.ly/2iZTcGg

[starcitizenprivateer]

via RSI Comm-Link

Q&A: Anvil Hawk

Greetings Citizens,

Below are answers to the most voted for questions in our Spectrum Q&A Thread we posted last week. Thank you for taking the time to submit your questions and voting for the ones you care about most.

Also, special thanks to Calix Reneau, Kirk Tome, and Steven Kam for their help in answering your questions.

Can we swap the holding cell for other equipment?

No, the holding cell in the Hawk is integrated specifically into its design. The Hawk is a small, focused ship. In general, modularity in engineering implies a bunch of things, including piping and plumbing, structural loadbearing, and bunch of other considerations designed to handle different equipment of varied capabilities. That stuff doesn’t come free in terms of weight, cost, or complexity, hence why not every internal space is just automatically modular by nature.

How many total weapons, types and sizes, is the Hawk supposed to have?

The Hawk has 4 S2 and 2 S1 Weapon hardpoints with 1 small EMP device.

Is the EMP from the Hawk as strong as the EMP from the Raven?

At present, we expect the EMP on the Hawk to be in the same neighborhood of effectiveness as one of the Raven’s. A balance pass is scheduled for 2018 and this information may change.

When will the variants become available that are mentioned in the brochure?

The variants described in the brochure are ships that exist in the fiction of Star Citizen’s universe. Currently, there are no plans to implement these variants. Let’s see how much you all like the original Hawk, for starters :).

Will the Hawk fit inside a Carrack?

Considering that both ships are in whitebox at the moment, we do not have the final dimensions of each ship and can’t definitively answer this yet. That said, it is unlikely as the Carrack’s hangar is designed to field a ship the size of a snub craft.

Brochure mentions gun rack. Where is it located?

It’s behind the deployable pilot seat.

It was mentioned in the ATV that the prisoner transport pod could be used as a bed for the pilot. Is this the case?

Yes, it is possible that the pilot could use this as a bed, although probably a bit claustrophobic

How do the defensive features (e.g. shields, armor, countermeasures) of the Hawk compare to other light fighters such as the Gladius, Mustang Delta, and Defender?

Anvil designed the Hawk, so as you’d expect it’s reasonably durable, at least as light fighters go. In this respect we plan for it to have tougher armor than the Gladius, Mustang Delta, and the Defender. Its shield generators are presently intended to be similar in performance to those of a Gladius. While the Hawk carries on more armor, the Mustang Delta’s defenses include a larger store of countermeasures.

What’s the heaviest armor a player can wear while operating the Anvil Hawk?

Most of the real estate on planets, moons, and asteroids in UEE space that isn’t in active use or privately owned may be purchased. Some areas, however, have been designated as national parks, wildlife refuges, and nature preserves, and may not be claimed or legally exploited.

Is the Hawk going to be fast-tracked in development or is this going to be further down the road for getting in-game?

Generally speaking, smaller ships are simply easier to make, and ships without interior spaces are easier still. From a development perspective, the Hawk has fewer obstacles to production than larger ships with traversable interiors, and is therefore likely to be in game sooner.

Which loaner will be available until the anvil hawk is flight ready?

The Cutlass Black is the selected loaner ship for the Anvil Hawk.

Is the stated 500 m/s afterburner speed correct? If so, how will the Hawk stop prospective bounties from simply running away?

The Hawk is viewed as an entry level ship that focuses on being cheap, reliable, and versatile, and may not be able to handle every bounty – or at the least, may require a little extra tactical prowess to pull it off. As flight balance is an endeavor that will continue throughout the development process, the 200;500 stats should remain as a good comparison point for how the Hawk will perform relative to other ships as stated on the Ship Matrix according to the characteristics of the flight model point in time that it was introduced into the ship pipeline. Remember that as we experiment with the overall flight model to provide a better game experience over time, so too does ship performance adjust alongside it.

Is the prisoner stowage in the aft of the Hawk being designed for just a single seat, or will it be able to hold multiple bounties as the cells in the Avenger Stalker do?

The Hawk’s containment pod accommodates one prisoner.

This is an Anvil Ship, but it is still a light fighter. This class of ship relies on speed to survive and win fights. Since it’s already stated to be slower than the Gladius, what other points make this ship a viable choice over it, since the Gladius got the S3 buff?

Every ship has its purpose. The Hawk is a light fighter with bounty hunting features. There are some missions for which a Hawk is suited that a Gladius isn’t. Even considering their different mission profiles, however, the Hawk has an EMP device, which will play better in certain situations than a limited loadout of missiles (perhaps especially in bounty hunting), and it also has comparable shielding to and better armor protection than the Gladius. Remember too, the benefits of armor protection versus shielding against different types of weapons; although of course one prefers not to get hit, when you do get hit, sometimes you really want that armor.

What is the (in-atmo) air speed velocity of an unladen Hawk?

African or European? In all seriousness, having the prisoner in the holding pod will not noticeably impact the air speed velocity. Under the latest flight model in testing, at 1 atmosphere and neutral conditions, the flight speed would be around 165 m/s with max safe air speed be around 339 m/s.

Do I need to file a claim to build a base or mine?

No, you can freely build or mine planets and moons outside UEE controlled space but you’re on your own as far as security goes. It’s worth noting, too, that one of the largest deterrents to others moving in on a valuable section of land you’re working – or taking liberties with an outpost you’ve constructed – is the fact that within UEE space such actions are criminal and will have significant consequences for the infringers. These protections, of course, don’t exist beyond the borders.

Why make a bounty hunter ship with no interior?

Traversable interiors in general make a ship considerably larger – something you’ve had the opportunity to witness in the development histories of some of our other ships. Larger surface area and internal volume can in turn translate to higher mass (see http://ift.tt/2yxL5FU for info on how this affects our ship mass derivations), which quickly runs counter the Hawk’s design aim of a light fighter with a small landing footprint. Without an interior, the Hawk can run lighter, cheaper, and be more nimble. Instead of supports and reinforcements to shore up against the structural weakness of large empty spaces (relative to the size of the ship), those materials are more uniformly dedicated to keeping components and resource pipes firmly in place, making them more dense. This also benefits to the lone wolf nature of a player who only wants to pilot a single-seater bounty hunter ship.

What are the correct dimensions for the Hawk?

The current stats are: 17m long, 22m wide, 6.5m tall – It’s important to note that the ship is in whitebox and these dimensions may change as it moves through the production pipeline.

   $(function() {      Page.init();  window.Page = new RSI.Game.About();      });    

[sad-ch1ld]

via RSI Comm-Link

Q&A: Anvil Hawk

Greetings Citizens,

Below are answers to the most voted for questions in our Spectrum Q&A Thread we posted last week. Thank you for taking the time to submit your questions and voting for the ones you care about most.

Also, special thanks to Calix Reneau, Kirk Tome, and Steven Kam for their help in answering your questions.

Can we swap the holding cell for other equipment?

No, the holding cell in the Hawk is integrated specifically into its design. The Hawk is a small, focused ship. In general, modularity in engineering implies a bunch of things, including piping and plumbing, structural loadbearing, and bunch of other considerations designed to handle different equipment of varied capabilities. That stuff doesn’t come free in terms of weight, cost, or complexity, hence why not every internal space is just automatically modular by nature.

How many total weapons, types and sizes, is the Hawk supposed to have?

The Hawk has 4 S2 and 2 S1 Weapon hardpoints with 1 small EMP device.

Is the EMP from the Hawk as strong as the EMP from the Raven?

At present, we expect the EMP on the Hawk to be in the same neighborhood of effectiveness as one of the Raven’s. A balance pass is scheduled for 2018 and this information may change.

When will the variants become available that are mentioned in the brochure?

The variants described in the brochure are ships that exist in the fiction of Star Citizen’s universe. Currently, there are no plans to implement these variants. Let’s see how much you all like the original Hawk, for starters :).

Will the Hawk fit inside a Carrack?

Considering that both ships are in whitebox at the moment, we do not have the final dimensions of each ship and can’t definitively answer this yet. That said, it is unlikely as the Carrack’s hangar is designed to field a ship the size of a snub craft.

Brochure mentions gun rack. Where is it located?

It’s behind the deployable pilot seat.

It was mentioned in the ATV that the prisoner transport pod could be used as a bed for the pilot. Is this the case?

Yes, it is possible that the pilot could use this as a bed, although probably a bit claustrophobic

How do the defensive features (e.g. shields, armor, countermeasures) of the Hawk compare to other light fighters such as the Gladius, Mustang Delta, and Defender?

Anvil designed the Hawk, so as you’d expect it’s reasonably durable, at least as light fighters go. In this respect we plan for it to have tougher armor than the Gladius, Mustang Delta, and the Defender. Its shield generators are presently intended to be similar in performance to those of a Gladius. While the Hawk carries on more armor, the Mustang Delta’s defenses include a larger store of countermeasures.

What’s the heaviest armor a player can wear while operating the Anvil Hawk?

Most of the real estate on planets, moons, and asteroids in UEE space that isn’t in active use or privately owned may be purchased. Some areas, however, have been designated as national parks, wildlife refuges, and nature preserves, and may not be claimed or legally exploited.

Is the Hawk going to be fast-tracked in development or is this going to be further down the road for getting in-game?

Generally speaking, smaller ships are simply easier to make, and ships without interior spaces are easier still. From a development perspective, the Hawk has fewer obstacles to production than larger ships with traversable interiors, and is therefore likely to be in game sooner.

Which loaner will be available until the anvil hawk is flight ready?

The Cutlass Black is the selected loaner ship for the Anvil Hawk.

Is the stated 500 m/s afterburner speed correct? If so, how will the Hawk stop prospective bounties from simply running away?

The Hawk is viewed as an entry level ship that focuses on being cheap, reliable, and versatile, and may not be able to handle every bounty – or at the least, may require a little extra tactical prowess to pull it off. As flight balance is an endeavor that will continue throughout the development process, the 200;500 stats should remain as a good comparison point for how the Hawk will perform relative to other ships as stated on the Ship Matrix according to the characteristics of the flight model point in time that it was introduced into the ship pipeline. Remember that as we experiment with the overall flight model to provide a better game experience over time, so too does ship performance adjust alongside it.

Is the prisoner stowage in the aft of the Hawk being designed for just a single seat, or will it be able to hold multiple bounties as the cells in the Avenger Stalker do?

The Hawk’s containment pod accommodates one prisoner.

This is an Anvil Ship, but it is still a light fighter. This class of ship relies on speed to survive and win fights. Since it’s already stated to be slower than the Gladius, what other points make this ship a viable choice over it, since the Gladius got the S3 buff?

Every ship has its purpose. The Hawk is a light fighter with bounty hunting features. There are some missions for which a Hawk is suited that a Gladius isn’t. Even considering their different mission profiles, however, the Hawk has an EMP device, which will play better in certain situations than a limited loadout of missiles (perhaps especially in bounty hunting), and it also has comparable shielding to and better armor protection than the Gladius. Remember too, the benefits of armor protection versus shielding against different types of weapons; although of course one prefers not to get hit, when you do get hit, sometimes you really want that armor.

What is the (in-atmo) air speed velocity of an unladen Hawk?

African or European? In all seriousness, having the prisoner in the holding pod will not noticeably impact the air speed velocity. Under the latest flight model in testing, at 1 atmosphere and neutral conditions, the flight speed would be around 165 m/s with max safe air speed be around 339 m/s.

Do I need to file a claim to build a base or mine?

No, you can freely build or mine planets and moons outside UEE controlled space but you’re on your own as far as security goes. It’s worth noting, too, that one of the largest deterrents to others moving in on a valuable section of land you’re working – or taking liberties with an outpost you’ve constructed – is the fact that within UEE space such actions are criminal and will have significant consequences for the infringers. These protections, of course, don’t exist beyond the borders.

Why make a bounty hunter ship with no interior?

Traversable interiors in general make a ship considerably larger – something you’ve had the opportunity to witness in the development histories of some of our other ships. Larger surface area and internal volume can in turn translate to higher mass (see http://ift.tt/2yxL5FU for info on how this affects our ship mass derivations), which quickly runs counter the Hawk’s design aim of a light fighter with a small landing footprint. Without an interior, the Hawk can run lighter, cheaper, and be more nimble. Instead of supports and reinforcements to shore up against the structural weakness of large empty spaces (relative to the size of the ship), those materials are more uniformly dedicated to keeping components and resource pipes firmly in place, making them more dense. This also benefits to the lone wolf nature of a player who only wants to pilot a single-seater bounty hunter ship.

What are the correct dimensions for the Hawk?

The current stats are: 17m long, 22m wide, 6.5m tall – It’s important to note that the ship is in whitebox and these dimensions may change as it moves through the production pipeline.

   $(function() {      Page.init();  window.Page = new RSI.Game.About();      });    

[letssparklywinnercollection-blog]

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[nicholemhearn]

The End of the Working Class

Increased income inequality; wage stagnation; skill-biased technological change; productivity growth slowdown; rising college wage premium; labor-market polarization; declining prime-age labor force participation; low intergenerational relative mobility; declining absolute mobility—all of these are concepts developed by economists to describe the dimming prospects for ordinary American workers. Taken together, they inform the consensus view that something is wrong with the American economy that isn’t going away anytime soon.

But if we follow the experts in looking at our problems solely from an economic perspective, we will fail to appreciate the true gravity of our situation. Yes, the relevant data on “real” or inflation-adjusted incomes have been disappointing and worrisome for decades. In particular, the sharp rise in income inequality, created mostly by a rollicking rise in the top 1 percent of incomes, has meant that incomes for typical American households have not kept pace with the overall growth of the economy. Nevertheless, a careful and dispassionate review of the data shows that incomes continued to inch upwards since the 1970s. Indeed, of those who “fell” out of middle-class status over the past 25 years, depending on how one defines it, a good many fell “up” to higher income brackets. Although the Great Recession knocked incomes downward, they have now recovered almost all the ground they lost. When we factor in the fact that comparisons of real incomes can never capture access to new products that previously were unavailable at any price, the reasonable conclusion is that overall material living standards in the United States today are at their highest levels ever. Relative stagnation may frustrate our expectations, but isn’t the same thing as collapse.

If we pull back from a narrow focus on incomes and purchasing power, however, we see something much more troubling than economic stagnation. Outside a well-educated and comfortable elite comprising 20-25 percent of Americans, we see unmistakable signs of social collapse. We see, more precisely, social disintegration—the progressive unraveling of the human connections that give life structure and meaning: declining attachment to work; declining participation in community life; declining rates of marriage and two-parent childrearing.1

This is a genuine crisis, but its roots are spiritual, not material, deprivation. Among whites, whose fall has been from greater heights, the spreading anomie has boiled over into headline-grabbing acts of self-destructive desperation. First, the celebrated findings of Anne Case and Angus Deaton have alerted us to a shocking rise in mortality among middle-aged whites, fueled by suicide, substance abuse—opioids make headlines these days but they hardly exhaust the list—and other “deaths of despair.”2 And this past November, whites in Rust Belt states made the difference in putting the incompetent demagogue Donald Trump into the White House.

What we are witnessing is the human wreckage of a great historical turning point, a profound change in the social requirements of economic life. We have come to the end of the working class.

We still use “working class” to refer to a big chunk of the population—to a first approximation, people without a four-year college degree, since those are the people now most likely to be stuck with society’s lowest-paying, lowest-status jobs. But as an industrial concept in a post-industrial world, the term doesn’t really fit anymore. Historian Jefferson Cowie had it right when he gave his history Stayin’ Alive the subtitle The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class, implying that the coming of the post-industrial economy ushered in a transition to a post-working class. Or, to use sociologist Andrew Cherlin’s formulation, a “would-be working class—the individuals who would have taken the industrial jobs we used to have.”

The working class was a distinctive historical phenomenon with real internal coherence. Its members shared a whole set of binding institutions (most prominently, labor unions), an ethos of solidarity and resistance to corporate exploitation, and a genuine pride about their place and role in society. Their successors, by contrast, are just an aggregation of loose, unconnected individuals, defined in the mirror of everyday life by failure and exclusion. They failed to get the educational credentials needed to enter the meritocracy, from which they are therefore excluded. That failure puts them on the outside looking in, with no place of their own to give them a sense of belonging, status, and, above all, dignity.

Here then is the social reality that the narrowly economic perspective cannot apprehend. A way of life has died, and with it a vital source of identity. In the aftermath, many things are falling apart—local economies, communities, families, lives.

This slow-motion catastrophe has been triggered by a fundamental change in how the capitalist division of labor is organized. From the first stirrings of the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century until relatively recently, the miraculous technological progress and wealth creation of modern economic growth depended on large inputs of unskilled, physically demanding labor. That is no longer the case in the United States or other advanced economies. Between automation and offshoring, our country’s most technologically dynamic industries—the ones that account for the lion’s share of innovation and productivity growth—now make little use of American manual labor.

The U.S. economy still employs large numbers of less-skilled workers, of course. They exist in plentiful supply, and U.S. labor markets are functional enough to roughly match that supply with demand for it. But all of this is occurring in what are now the backwaters of economic life. The dynamic sectors that propel the whole system forward, and on which hinge hopes for continued improvement in material living conditions, don’t have much need today for callused hands and strong backs—and will have less need every year going forward.

Economists describe this situation drily as “skill-biased technological change”—in other words, innovation that increases the demand for highly skilled specialists relative to ordinary workers. They contrast the current dynamics to the skill-neutral transition from an agrarian to an industrial economy. Then, workers displaced from farm jobs by mechanization could find factory work without first having to acquire any new specialized expertise. By contrast, former steel and autoworkers in the Rust Belt did not have the skills needed to take advantage of the new job opportunities created by the information technology revolution.

Here again, exclusive reliance on the tools of economics fails to convey the full measure of what has happened. In the heyday of the American working class during the late 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, the position of workers in society was buttressed by more than simply robust demand for their skills and effort. First, they had law and policy on their side. The Wagner Act of 1935 created a path toward mass unionization of unskilled industrial workers and a regime for collective bargaining on wages and working conditions. And during World War II, the Federal government actively promoted unionization in war production plants. As a result, some three-quarters of blue-collar workers, comprising over a third of the total American workforce, were union members by the early 1950s. The Wagner Act’s legal structure allowed workers to amass bargaining power and direct it in unison against management, suppressing wage competition among workers across whole industries. Unionized workers were thus empowered to negotiate wages roughly 10 to 15 percent above market rates, as well as a whole raft of workplace protections.

It is important to note that the strictly legal advantages enjoyed by labor at the height of its powers have diminished very little since then. There has been only one significant retrenchment of union powers since the Wagner Act, and that occurred with the passage (over President Truman’s veto) of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947—a few years before organized labor reached its high-water mark. What really transformed labor law from words on a page into real power was the second great prop of the working class’s position in society: collective action. Congress did not unionize U.S. industry; mass action did, never more dramatically than in the great General Motors sit-down strike of 1936–37, which led to the unionization of the U.S. auto industry. And once unions were in place, labor’s negotiating strength hinged on the credibility of the threat of strikes. Coming out of World War II, when strikes had been strongly discouraged, American workers hammered home the seriousness of that threat with a wave of labor actions, as more than five million workers went on strike during the year after V-J Day—the most strike-ridden year in American history.

This militancy and group cohesion paved the way for the 1950 “Treaty of Detroit” between Charlie Wilson’s General Motors and Walter Reuther’s United Automobile Workers. The deal provided the basic template for labor’s postwar ascendancy, in which workers got automatic cost-of-living adjustments and productivity-based wage increases while production schedules, pricing, investment, and technological change were all conceded to fall within the “managerial prerogative.” “GM may have paid a billion for peace,” wrote Daniel Bell, then a young reporter for Fortune, but “it got a bargain.”

The declining fortunes of organized labor are a direct result of workers’ ebbing capacity for collective action. After the great wave of unionization beginning in the 1930s, organizing rates peaked in the early 1950s and then went into long-term decline. As employment in smokestack industries started falling in the 1970s, the number of newly organized workers lagged badly behind and the overall strength of unions progressively waned.

This flagging commitment to union solidarity cannot be explained satisfactorily without reference to the changing nature of the workplace. The unique—and uniquely awful—character of factory work was the essential ingredient that created a self-conscious working class in the first place. Dirty and dangerous work, combined with the regimentation and harsh discipline of the shop floor, led workers to see themselves as engaged in something like war—with their employer as the enemy. Class warfare, then, was no mere metaphor or abstract possibility: it was a daily, lived reality.

“It is a reproach to our civilization,” admitted President Benjamin Harrison in 1889, “that any class of American workmen should in the pursuit of a necessary and useful vocation be subjected to a peril of life and limb as great as that of a soldier in time of war.” At that time, the body count of workplace deaths and injuries hovered around one million a year. Such conditions begat efforts to organize and fight back—often literally. The “Molly Maguires” episode in the Pennsylvania coal fields, the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 that claimed more than a hundred lives, Haymarket, Homestead, Cripple Creek, the Ludlow Massacre—these are just some of the more memorable episodes among countless violent clashes as the agents of capital struggled to keep a lid on the pressures created by the demands they made of their workers.

The best part of working-class life, solidarity, was thus inextricably tied up with all the worst parts. As work softened, moving out of hot, clanging factories and into air-conditioned offices, the fellow-feeling born of shared pain and struggle inevitably dissipated.

But at the zenith of working-class fortunes, the combination of law and collective action gave labor leaders powers that extended far beyond the factory floor to matters of macroeconomic and geopolitical significance. This capacity to affect domestic politics and international relations further bolstered the position and influence of the working class. When steel or autoworkers went on strike, the resulting disruptions extended far beyond the specific companies the unions were targeting. Labor unrest in critical industries affected the health of the overall U.S. economy, and any threat to the stability of America’s industrial might was also a threat to national security and international order. Consider Harry Truman’s decision in April 1952, during the Korean War, to nationalize the U.S. steel industry just hours before workers were planning to walk out on strike. We generally remember the incident as an extreme overreach of Executive Branch power that was slapped down by the Supreme Court, but the point here is to illustrate the immense power wielded by unions and the high stakes of any breakdowns in industrial relations.

The postwar ascendancy of the working class was thus due to an interlocking and mutually reinforcing complex of factors. It was not just favorable labor laws, not just inspired collective action, but the combination of the two in conjunction with the heavy dependence on manual labor by technologically progressive industries of critical importance to national and global welfare—all of these elements, working in concert—that gave ordinary workers the rapid economic gains and social esteem that now cause us to look back on this period with such longing. And the truly essential element was the dependence of industry on manual labor. For it was that dependence, and the conflicts between companies and workers that it produced, which led to the labor movement that was responsible both for passage of the Wagner Act and the solidarity that translated law into mass unionization.

No sooner was this working-class triumph achieved than it began to unravel. The continued progress of economic development—paced by ongoing advances in automation, globalization, and the shift of output and employment away from manufacturing and into services—chipped relentlessly away at both heavy industry’s reliance on manual labor and the relative importance of heavy industry to overall economic performance.

These processes began in earnest longer ago than many observers today remember. U.S. multinational corporations quadrupled their investments overseas between 1957 and 1973—from $25 billion to $104 billion in constant dollars. And back in 1964, the “Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution” made headlines with a memorandum to President Johnson on the threat of mass technological unemployment as a result of automation. But this was just the beginning. As information technology supplanted smokestack industry at the vanguard of technological progress, and as demand for labor generally shifted in favor of more highly skilled workers, the working class didn’t just go into decline. It eventually disintegrated.

There is a great deal of nostalgia these days for the factory jobs and stable communities of the egalitarian 1950s and 1960s—when working-class life was as good as it ever got. The sense of loss is understandable, as nothing as promising or stable has replaced that way of life now gone. But this lament for what has been lost is the cry of the Children of Israel in the wilderness, longing for the relative comforts of Egypt. We must remember that, even in the halcyon postwar decades, blue-collar existence was a kind of bondage. And so the end of the working class, though experienced now as an overwhelmingly negative event, opens up at least the possibility of a better, freer future for ordinary workers.

The creation of the working class was capitalism’s original sin. The economic revolution that would ultimately liberate humanity from mass poverty was made possible by a new and brutal form of domination. Yes, employment relations were voluntary: a worker was always free to quit his job and seek a better position elsewhere. And yes, over time the institution of wage labor became the primary mechanism for translating capitalism’s miraculous productivity into higher living standards for ordinary people. Because of these facts, conservatives and libertarians have difficulty seeing what was problematic about the factory system.

We can dismiss the Marxist charge of economic exploitation through extraction of surplus value. Meager pay and appalling working conditions during the earlier stages of industrialization reflected not capitalist perfidy but objective reality. The abysmal poverty of the agrarian societies out of which industrialization emerged meant that nothing much better was affordable, or on offer to the great majority of families.

But that is not the end of the inquiry. We need to face the fact that workers routinely rebelled against the factory system that provided their livelihoods—not a normal response to mutually beneficial exchanges. First were the individual mutinies: no-shows and quitting were commonplace. During the early 20thcentury, absenteeism rates stood at 10 percent or higher in many U.S. industries, and the usual turnover rate for factory employees exceeded 100 percent a year. For those who made it to work, drinking, drug use, monkeywrenching to slow the line, and other acts of small-scale sabotage were regularly availed outlets for sticking it to the man.

More consequential than these acts of private desperation were the incessant attempts to organize collective action in the teeth of ferocious opposition from both employers and, usually, the state. Mass labor movements were the universal reaction around the world to the introduction of the factory system. These movements aimed to effect change not only in the terms of employment at specific workplaces, but in the broader political system as well. Although socialist radicalism did not dominate the U.S. labor movement, it was the rule elsewhere as the Industrial Revolution wrought its “creative destruction” of earlier agrarian ways. Whether through revolutionary or democratic means, elimination of private ownership of industry and the wage system was the ultimate goal.

Since grinding poverty had long been the accepted norm in agrarian economies, what was it about industrial work that provoked such a powerfully negative response? One big difference was that the recurrent want and physical hardships of rural life had existed since time immemorial, and thus seemed part of the natural order. Likewise, the oppressive powers of the landed aristocracy were inherited, and sanctified by ancient custom. By contrast, the new energy-intensive, mechanized methods of production were jarringly novel and profoundly unnatural. And the new hierarchy of bourgeois master and proletarian servant had been erected intentionally by capitalists for their own private gain. There had been solace in the fatalism of the old Great Chain of Being: all the orders of society, from high to low, were equally subject to the transcendent dictates of God and nature. Inside the factory, though, industrialists subjected both nature and humanity to their own arbitrary wills, untethered from any inhibition of noblesse oblige. The traditional basis for the deference of low to high had been wrecked; the bourgeoisie’s new position at the top of the social pyramid was consequently precarious.

Another reason for the restiveness of industrial workers was the factory system’s creation of enabling circumstances. In other words, workers engaged in united resistance because they could. In the agrarian era, highly dispersed and immobile peasants faced nearly insuperable obstacles to organizing on a large scale—which is why peasant revolts were as uncommon as they were futile. The factory system dramatically reduced the costs of organizing for collective action by concentrating workers in large, crowded workplaces located in large, crowded cities. Toiling and living together at close quarters allowed individualized discontent to translate into concerted resistance. Solidarity was a consequence of falling transaction costs.

At the heart of the matter, though, was the nature of the work. According to the cold logic of mechanized production, the technical efficiency of the human element in that process is maximized when it is rendered as machine-like as possible. Machines achieve their phenomenal productivity by performing a sequence of discrete, simple tasks over and over again, always the same, always precisely and accurately, as rapidly as possible. Humans are most productive in filling in the gaps of mechaniz from nicholemhearn digest https://niskanencenter.org/blog/end-working-class/

[sublimedeal]

PIXEL MASTERY LIVE – Los Angeles 2017

PIXEL MASTERY LIVE – Los Angeles 2017

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PIXEL MASTERY

LIVE EVENT LOS ANGELES, CA Jul 14TH-16TH 2017 PIXEL MASTERY LIVE – Los Angeles 2017 Only Available For A Very Limited Time, Get Instant Access Now! WHY YOU SHOULD ATTEND Thomas and I have been running paid traffic and marketing campaigns for the past fews years and have included Facebook traffic as one of our primary traffic strategies to grow our businesses and that of our coaching students from 6 to 7 figures. We’re a couple of ‘old guys’ who have been around the block, but who understand how to harness the power of Facebook marketing and direct response to drive hundreds of thousands of daily visitors into ecommerce sales funnels.

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Our system covers Facebook Advertising and how to utilise it to build, optimise and scale campaigns quickly. We then show you how to leverage the traffic further and how to increase the conversion by using various strategies and funnels. We take things even further by showing you how to accelerate your business growth by using system to grow you backend profits!

Facebook Mastery – Traffic We’ll be sharing how to effectively market on Facebook, no matter what you sell. We’ll cover every single aspect of how to harness the power of Facebook marketing. We’ll show you which types of campaigns to use, the objectives, optimisation, pixels, audiences, how to understand your key metrics, how to spot the losers and scale the winners. You’ll discover how we start off our campaigns, test interests, demographics, placement, objectives, pixels, audiences and how we setup up reporting metrics, plus how to quickly identify from the data which ads to kill and which ads to optimize and scale. You’ll get a personal ‘fly on the wall’ insider view of what we do, why we do it, how we do it’ and how you can do it too. Funnel Mastery – Conversion Nothing is going to be held back…You’ll discover why you need funnels, what they do, how they do it, and how you can leverage the power of funnels to increase the conversion rate from your traffic, and how to turn more visitors into paying customers. You’ll discover the software tools, apps and exact strategies we use to generate thousands of leads daily, hundreds of thousands of visitors daily, and how we convert these ‘stone cold’ visitors and how we get them to become a new customers. You’ll walk away from this live event equipped with the knowledge and strategies to leverage the power of Facebook marketing and high converting funnels, and how you can turn cold traffic into sales and new customers without breaking the bank. Business Mastery – 7 Figure Growth How do businesses go from 6 figures to 7 figures?…and how is this done in a few months not years? How do you go from just you and working 16 hours a day to a systemised and leveraged team? How do you go from struggling with a lack of cash flow to having a predictable and recurring revenue stream? We’ll share with you exactly how to take your business from 6 to 7 figures. You’ll discover, how to build systems, teams, which software we use and what business models to adopt to grow your business in the right way for sustainable and reliable income streams, allowing you more time to work on the more important areas of your business which will help you grow.

You can discover the exact daily agenda for the Live Workshop below in The Event Schedule.

PIXEL MASTERY

LIVE EVENT LOS ANGELES, CA Jul 14TH-16TH 2017

Only Available For A Very Limited Time, Get Instant Access Now! WHO ARE WE?

Thomas Bartke – AKA the Pixel Whisperer Thomas started with Internet Marketing in 1997 with mixed success, and continued to try different things, Affiliate Marketing, Webinar Marketing and REI. In 2013 Thomas learnt of Teespring and started with Facebook advertising, and this is where things started to take off. In April of 2015 Thomas opened his own Shopify stores and since then he hasn’t looked back. In just over 14 months Thomas has generated over $7M in revenue. Thomas has a special talent when it comes to Facebook advertising. He has perfected how to do rapid optimization and scaling using Facebook, Instagram, and Google Adwords traffic. Thomas is also the creator of Trackify, and has earned the nickname the ‘Pixel Whisperer’.

John Hutchison – AKA the Funnel Whisperer John started his ecommerce career back in 1994. Back then the online world was a little different. In 1999, John was involved with building one of the first online casinos and this is when John first discovered how powerful a business tool the internet would become. It wasn’t until 2004 that John left his consultancy career and started his own ecommerce store. Ever since then, and many stores and niches later, John continues to run traffic, build funnels and convert visitors into paying customers. John consults with many top brands and also coaches students to leverage the power of the internet and how to start and grow multi 6 to 7 figure businesses online. Los Angeles Guest Speakers

TODD BROWN Founder of MarketingFunnelAutomation.com Considered THE authority on creating profitable marketing funnels, Todd Brown is the funnel expert other experts go to when they need help with their own funnels. His list of clients is a Who’s Who of A-List Marketers. And his agency creates campaigns for the biggest direct marketing companies online.

TREY LEWELLEN CEO Come hear the crazy story of how a mega million dollar affiliate niche was started! Then stay for the details of how it was all done.

Trey reveals everything that he did, to go from $0 to multi-millions of dollars in his first year selling. The story starts from selling t-shirts online, to sourcing products and scaling his eCommerce company into a multimillion dollar per year company selling nothing but physical products through simple funnels. Coming to us via virtual live stream.

Jordan Gal Cofounder and CEO of CartHook Cofounder and CEO of CartHook, a one-page checkout and one-click upsell app for Shopify. He previously built and sold a succesful ecommerce business with his two brothers. He’s also the cohost of the Bootstrapped Web podcast. He lives in Portland with his wife and three daughters

Jaime Smith CF PRO TOOLS CREATOR A 17 year veteran software developer, turned funnel hacker with a passion for online marketing and human psychology. He’s had the great fortune of working with some of the greatest online marketers in the world.

He’s the creator of CF Pro Tools, which is a suite of custom add-ons for ClickFunnels pages, and currently has over 2300 members. CF Pro Tools add-ons are currently powering dozens of funnels that are generating 7 figures per year and more.

FRANK KEENEY RETARGETING ACADEMY CREATOR Frank Keeney started his first ecommerce business in 2001 from his garage. Within four years he was the top distributor for multiple brands of electronics and other merchindise. Sales continue to grow with millions of sales every year. Over the last three years Frank has found continued sales growth on social media platforms and Amazon FBA. Frank has spoken on many webinars and events helping others grow their ecommerce and Amazon FBA businesses. He is the creator of the online course Retargeting Academy. When he’s not working you may find him overlanding in the Southwest deserts in his LandCruiser with family and friends or fishing off the coast of California.

DIMITRIS SKIADAS DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGIST Dimitris Skiadas is a digital marketing strategist & consultant to dozens of private entrepreneurial clients running businesses from $500.000 to $30 millions in size. With a background in accounting and financial consulting, he is known in the market for finding the leak in any store and optimizing it for optimum results. He has worked with some of the biggest brands in Greece like WIND Hellas, Adidas Greece, Philadelphia, Folli Follie etc and worked in person with some of the most successful Internet marketers and entrepreneurs like Donald Wilson, Matt Schmitt, Travis Petelle and many others on various Google Analytics & Adwords projects.

Adam Maltais Shopify Affiliate Manager Adam has been using digital media to generate leads and sales for over a decade. He was an affiliate manager at MaxBounty, one of the world leading CPA networks. He then joined Shopify to launch their affiliate program and it has quickly grown to be a major driver of the companies new customer acquisition. Adam is also an advisor and consults for multiple 7-8 figure ecommerce companies

SOPHIE HOWARD ASPIRING ENTREPRENEURS FOUNDER If you want to talk physical products or Amazon you need to talk to Sophie. Sophie Howard is based in New Zealand and runs several 6 and 7-figure Amazon businesses in the US, UK and Europe. Sophie sold one US Amazon account in mid 2016 for over 7-figures USD.

She developed the Minimum Viable Brand for physical products to be sold online at premium prices and scale fast. She loves sourcing products from around the world, usually in places where no one else is looking. Sophie loves to help build smart, passive businesses that can scale and have a 7-figure residual asset value as well as the cash flow they generate. Prior to entering the world of e-commerce Sophie founded and ran high tech start up companies for Victoria University in Wellington, worked in the pharmaceutical industry and was a diplomat for the New Zealand government. She has an MBA (Distinction) and a MSc Genetics.

BRET THOMSON BEST SELLING AUTHOR One of Australia’s highest-paid, in-demand copywriting and conversion specialists, responsible for generating over $220million of new sales across dozens of industries in the last 10-years. Bret is also a best selling author, speaker, coach and mentor to thousands on the subject of direct-response copywriting and marketing. He also runs one of the world’s fast-moving copywriting agencies and now teaches other ambitious business owners how to make more money from their marketing with improved strategies and conversions.

DR NIC LUCAS COACH, AUTHOR & ENTREPRENEUR Nic works with entrepreneurs and CEOs, to help them to approach life and business with more clarity, purpose and certainty. His coaching elevates people from a place in which they need a solution, to a place in which there is no problem. He started his first company in 1997 and took an entire health care industry by storm, establishing his reputation as a rigorous scientist and influential entrepreneur. He has launched and sold numerous business, and has a unique background in neuroscience and digital marketing, with a particular focus on mindset, human behaviour and leadership. Nic understands the mind of an entrepreneur. He has wrestled with the dark side and he oozes a rare authenticity and transparency. He speaks from experience and with expertise and his insights about the challenges, failures and victories of the ‘entrepreneurs life’ will help you better understand your life and the other people in it. Get PIXEL MASTERY LIVE – Los Angeles 2017 right now!

PIXEL MASTERY LIVE – Los Angeles 2017 published first on http://ift.tt/2qxBbOD

[theopentable]

Temptations in the Wilderness, Part 1 (Matthew 4:1-11)

Market research came back with some pretty clear data following the September 11 attacks. The public were terrified of the outside world. Enter the Hummer: a military vehicle designed for war that you could now drive as a suburban car! 

This was a car that offered you freedom for fear, stability in a dangerous world (even if you were actually more likely to roll over than smaller, lower to the ground cars). In a fearful world, the illusion of safety will still sell.

The art of advertising involves constructing fear and providing the product solution [1]. Listerine, back in the 1950′s were pioneers in the efforts to pinpoint consumer anxiety:

"Jane has a pretty face. Men notice her lovely figure but never linger long. Because Jane has one big minus on her report card – halitosis: bad breath." (1950s advertisement for Listerine.)

Remember SARS and our escalating fear of bird flu? The background noise of pandemic fear was all it took to drive consumers to anti-bacterial soap. Once upon a time soap was marketed as a luxury item. Now it was a necessary weapon in the fight against germ warfare as soap went from the bathroom to the kitchen.

And yet, there is virtually no difference between ordinary soap and the medical-looking antibacterial stuff many of us now have in our houses.

Vitamin water sounds promising right? Vitamins keep us healthy right (and therefore stops us from dying and getting sick and stuff)? Well yes, but not this vitamin water, despite its claims. But by the time consumers caught up with the fact it was essentially a bottle of sugary water doing more harm than good the drink had made some people very rich. 

They got rich because it seemed like they sold a drink that could alleviate health fears, and yet, the drink only perpetuated health concerns!

The take home message? Fear sells. Fear moves products.

Fear moves human beings to action.

That’s actually the purpose of the emotion in human beings: if we recognise a threat we experience fear and that fear tells us to do something about it so that we are safe again.

It’s quite crude when you think about most of the consumer images we are constantly bombarded with: they are attempts to manipulate and exploit our primal human instincts to protect ourselves and keep us safe.

We are bombarded with images that tell us that if you buy this product then all of your problems with go away!

Only they don’t deliver us from our anxiety.

It might feel like it for a moment, but new insecurities and new fears will emerge.

And would you believe it, so to do shiny new products.

But it doesn’t just sell products either.

Human beings can be manipulated for other purposes too.

Trump built his whole campaign around fear, fear of outsiders mainly.

Fear of America slipping off of its powerful perch.

And it worked!

(although now a lot of people seem genuinely afraid of him)

*             *             *

We need to think about fear because it’s something that’s calling the shots in our lives more than we like to admit.

And because fear, in different forms, is part and parcel of the human experience.

We all have to deal with the fact that there are things that happen in and around us that are out of our control.

Things happen that we wouldn’t choose that rock our worlds.

And, inevitably, as a part of this delightful package we have this world of unsettling emotions that has a big life within us.

We have feelings living within us that can be challenging and scary and we don’t always know what to do with them.

They signal to us that there is some experience of dis-comfort.

They signal to us that there is some experience of dis-ease.

What I’ll explore over the next three weeks is that with these hard-to-have feelings come temptations that become part of how we deal with the world.

Now as adults, we don’t really like admitting that our feelings might be calling the shots in our lives.

We might not even realise just how much we do things to helps us to negotiate our hard-to-have feelings.

We might not get it or we might not like to admit it, but advertisers sure get it. People like Donald Trump get it.

And what they know is that we all want is something that will give us back a sense of comfort,

a sense of security, safety, or control.

We want to feel good, we want to feel happy, and so our feelings guide us into certain behaviours as a consequence.

*             *             *

And so let’s spend some time looking at this first temptation.

Jesus is in the wilderness.

Jesus is hungry and alone.

Jesus is vulnerable.

And this point of need, the devil offers Jesus a solution.

The devil is giving Jesus advice on what sort of Messiah he should be.

The devil is looking for insecurities, trying to get Jesus to question who he really is.

If you can create enough doubt and anxiety in a person you can manipulate them.

“If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread” (v3)

You hear that?

If you are the Son of God…

Prove yourself Jesus. And then the devil is kind enough to give an indication of what it might look like to prove that Jesus really is the Son of God.

Turn stones into bread.

Feed your hungry belly Jesus.

And be the type of leader that feeds everyone.

Give them bread Jesus.

Satisfy their appetites.

*             *             *

It’s not an unreasonable suggestion.

This is where the devil does its most sneaky work.

The devil tempts us with something that appears good.

Jesus was well aware of the hungry masses.

He himself was from a poor family.

He knew what it meant to go to bed hungry.

Most of the people in Jesus’ community lived one crisis away from utter catastrophe for their entire household.

And Jesus loved and cared for the poor.

So why not bread?

What’s wrong with bread?

The people would love Jesus for it!

I’m sure there’s worse things than being the Bread King.

*             *             *

What’s behind this temptation?

What seems to be on the line for Jesus is an understanding of what it really means to be human.

Jesus says to the devil

“It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone,     but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”

Human beings do not live by bread alone.

Of course we can’t live without bread, but there’s a bigger kind of Life that’s meant for human beings.

You are not what you eat. You’re far more than the sum of your appetites.

Now of course this probably sounds pretty obvious, but if you scratch the surface you could be forgiven for thinking that we actually take this whole living according to your appetites thing pretty seriously.

So despite the best intentions of those who marketed the Hummer post 9/11 what really sold well post 9/11 was something else: potatoes.

Why potatoes?

Well, when the world has become a deeply unsettling place, when you experience great discomfort and anguish, when you are afraid we all want the same thing: comfort.

Potatoes are good old fashioned comfort food.

For a large number of us, when we’re unhappy, we eat our emotions.

It’s our way of comforting ourselves, of self-medicating.

I’m not the only person playing this game but I am a big sucker for this one.

And it might not be bread for you. Or potatoes.

For me it’s coffee. Or anything sugary.

Any time I feel flat, or hurt, or weary, or worried I’m so much more vulnerable to this immense appetite for sugar or caffeine that lives within me.

I can smash a whole packet of lollies in no time.

Just lately our finances have been a little tight so Chels and I have both been doing what we can to keep expenses down.

For me it’s been avoiding buying coffee and any other little treat I might otherwise normally help myself too.

My goodness, I’m wide open. I am exposed.

I picked up some kind of flu-ey thing this week, but secretly I think it’s my body not knowing what to do with its regular staple of treats.

It’s my body punishing me from the inside out.

And of course, without my regular ways of coping with my normal range of hard-to-have feelings they’re staring me in the face. I can’t just eat them!

And so literally, one of the temptations Jesus faced, and one of the things all of us face, is this temptation to live for comfort, to feed our appetites with whatever makes us feel better in the moment.

None of us like feeling afraid or hurt.

So we do things to keep us from feeling that way.

Some people would say this is the basic theme behind addiction – and when I say addiction, that could be to so many different things, food, sex, television, drug and alcohol, being needed by other, you name it, but often with those things we become addicted to it’s not because we were looking to add extra problems to our lives.

It’s because we’re looking for a solution,

to our fears,

our pain,

our confusion.

It’s because we’ve found ourselves in the wilderness for too long and we no longer know what to do with our vulnerability.

And a solution comes along to make us stop feeling a certain way, even just for a bit.

And so we take, because it seems to offer us something.

Only it doesn’t come through.

Man doesn’t live on bread alone.

Temporary satisfaction doesn’t offer us what our souls crave.

Jesus says,

One does not live by bread alone,     but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”

Jesus wants us to know that we’re built for Life that can only come from God, it’s as if he wants us to discover a better addiction,

a life wrapped up in divine love, union and intimacy.

This is what St. Augustine of Hippo meant when he said,

“Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.”

Or, like C.S. Lewis, we could say the same thing in another way:

“God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. That is why it is just no good asking God to make us happy in our own way without bothering about religion. God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there.”

Jesus couldn’t reduce his vocation to the Bread King.

He couldn’t reduce human beings to mere bread-eating consumers.

Of course he could feed their appetites, he could make people feel good by taking away their worries for a moment.

But we don’t live on bread alone.

We built to run on God.

Our hearts are restless outside of God.

And so Jesus, himself in the wilderness, this Jesus who is hungry, hunted by the devil, entirely vulnerable, knows the temptation to seek out whatever makes us feel better in the moment.

This is one of the temptations in the wilderness for all of us.

But he points us beyond the temporary to the eternal, a kind of life and love we can experience here and now in God.

So what do we do during those wilderness times that are inevitable for all of us?

First, we want to be aware of our vulnerability so we can put some things in place that can help us so we’re not as easily given over to our appetites.

Be extra careful when you know you’re feeling hurt, angry, lonely or tired. We’re always more vulnerable then.

In recovery groups they’re times you lean on your supporters, your friends.

Sometimes we need someone else to be strong for us when we’re not feeling strong for ourselves.

And what you really want to cultivate over time are ways of praying and reflecting that enable new patterns and new cycles to emerge and greater intimacy with God.

When I say prayer and reflection I don’t mean times where you beat yourself up for stuffing up again or anything like that.

What I really mean are ways of abiding with the God who speaks into our being, these words:

You are loved. There is no reason to be afraid.

In love I created you in my inmost self and knit you together in your mother’s womb” (Psalm 139:13).

Prayer is really about growing into this love and learning more and more about what it means to be beloved.

It’s about dwelling in God’s company, listening to God’s voice, looking at God’s beauty, tasting God’s goodness.

Because when we taste God’s goodness it shows up everything else that pretends to offer what only God can.

This is what draws us into greater life and this is what transforms our fears.

1 John 4:18 tells us that there is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.

Love changes us.

Love changes us.

Love changes us.

We’re built for it.

Bread is fine for what it is, but love is our destiny.

[1] Thoughts and themes around advertising and fear adapted from this article: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/jul/06/how-advertising-industry-concept-fear